coe200_nader.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to cultures of energy. Here we are. It's me, Simone, and it's Dominic, too. And we're glad to be here with you. And Dominic has threatened me with a quiz. Oh, I got a quiz. I didn't even get to study for it. I wasn't even given the topic. But it's going to be perhaps humiliated live right now on the air. What do I do that discos

Speaker2: [00:00:48] Would humiliate a co-host?

Speaker1: [00:00:50] That sounds like if you're able to, you might. I mean, a boy can always try.

Speaker2: [00:00:55] And it's also not like, I get to leave you at the office. You know, you're going to, you know, where I live, you're going to come hunt me down. If I'm too bad,

Speaker1: [00:01:02] I do know I can tamper with your mail.

Speaker2: [00:01:04] Also, forget all of all of my junk mail that I get. Yeah, anyway, so exciting news, everyone. This is our two 100th episode today. It is also this week that we passed two hundred and fifty thousand downloads total, so two pretty big landmarks, and I thought I would ask Simone how to take a trip down memory lane with me and talk about some famous TV shows of our youth. Back when she used to watch TV, which was like, Not for very long. I understand you were very cool. You never tire of telling us how little you watch TV because of how exciting your life was. But while I know I'm pretty sure you watched all of these shows, at least somewhat, all of them had serious reruns of about 200 episodes. Oh yeah, some were a little more and some were a little less.

Speaker1: [00:01:52] Some really interesting research. So you just went into Google and said, like which seventies and eighties shows had 200 episodes?

Speaker2: [00:01:58] Not quite. Oh, not quite, but.

Speaker1: [00:02:01] But there's probably a whole book. There's probably a whole website out there. It's like shows that 200 had 200 episodes.

Speaker2: [00:02:07] The interweb has all sorts of info.

Speaker1: [00:02:09] Did you have to go to the dark

Speaker2: [00:02:09] Web to find? I did. I was. I got on my tour. I went deep into the dark web and I got it mostly from a Kazakh backed militia somewhere in Azerbaijan. So I think that's where this information is.

Speaker1: [00:02:22] They're very well known to be the gatherers of that kind of data, actually.

Speaker2: [00:02:25] What did they say on El Camino Church?

Speaker1: [00:02:29] That's an that is an expression.

Speaker2: [00:02:31] All right. We'll use it three more times in this episode, just so I can remember it and really practice it. So. Ok, so here's here's what I want you to do. I'm going to give you four TV show names, and I'm going to ask you just to tell me which had the most episodes and which had the least knowing that the range is pretty tight and it's all like a little bit above two hundred a little bit below 200,

Speaker1: [00:02:53] Meaning that one of them might have had 201 and one might have had one ninety nine or the

Speaker2: [00:02:58] Top one is closer to 240 and the bottom one is closer to like 180.

Speaker1: [00:03:04] Ok, OK, all right. Just so you know this is OK, you ready? I'm ready. She's ready. She's me. You know, even if I flunked this quiz, it's OK because it's a bit arbitrary, but I'm excited to try it.

Speaker2: [00:03:15] Just give us just give me your gut feeling based on how popular you think these shows were. Ok, OK. All right, I'm going to give them to you in random order. Here's a show, and OK, let me. Two of them had returned reboots, right? Ok. We're not counting the reboot episode. I was counting the original series rerun episode, so X-Files Will and Grace Seinfeld and Friends.

Speaker1: [00:03:42] Wow. So although I have to guess which one had the most.

Speaker2: [00:03:47] Yeah, just give them give me your sense of what?

Speaker1: [00:03:50] That's hard because they were all, of course, very popular and very much syndicated as what they call it and have screened all over the world. Oh yeah. And so there are many, many episodes, and I certainly because I watch so little TV. As you may remember, I certainly haven't seen all one hundred and eighty know two hundred and forty.

Speaker2: [00:04:08] You don't need to. And let me just just by way of comparison, you might have thought, Well, why not? Why didn't you put it in some of these like prestige cable shows? Well, those shows, like The Wire had like 50 episodes.

Speaker1: [00:04:19] Yeah, right? Because it was Five Seasons

Speaker2: [00:04:21] Is five seasons of 10 episodes. The Sopranos had like 80 something. Yeah. So they're not even nearly in the ballpark. Yeah, you had to be back in the era of TV

Speaker1: [00:04:30] When there was just infinite. It was like, Yeah, they were just run it until they ran it into the ground.

Speaker2: [00:04:36] A series like a series was 23 episodes, twenty six episodes and it was like all year, basically. I don't have that information. Oh my god, let's talking to me, my phone,

Speaker1: [00:04:46] Just talking to you. How did that even happen? I thought it had to read your face and even to even be able to turn on.

Speaker2: [00:04:52] Why was it saying, you know that that

Speaker1: [00:04:54] Information it must have? It it was listening to you? Oh my God, I think they do. I think phones do listen to you like they could so that they're it's really creepy. And a lot of people feel that it's a very pernicious invasion of privacy. But I think the phone is constantly listening because it's waiting for your voice command.

Speaker2: [00:05:13] Oh, so did I say Siri?

Speaker1: [00:05:15] I don't know. Maybe you said something that it thought you were calling it to life series o series. So that's why, yes. Ok, so I thought you said, well, you did say Syria, I guess I'm going to. Ok, so get it

Speaker2: [00:05:27] From now until 1:00, so we

Speaker1: [00:05:28] Maybe should tell it not to listen

Speaker2: [00:05:31] To your. Or do you want Syria to help you with this quiz?

Speaker1: [00:05:33] No. Ok, here's OK. Here's my first guest. Ok, first guess. And you told me if it's right or wrong, OK, I think the one that had the most.

Speaker2: [00:05:42] Do you want to hear them again? Do you want to hear the first? Ok. All right.

Speaker1: [00:05:45] I think the one that had the most episodes was friends. You're right,

Speaker2: [00:05:49] Ok? Friends had two hundred and thirty six episodes. Ok. All right. That was a good guess. And in a way, I don't know if I would have gone there too. I had another one on this list that if you gave it to me blind I would go with. But friends is a very good bet. Ok? Did you watch friends with friends who show you? I mean,

Speaker1: [00:06:06] I didn't watch it, but I've seen it right. I feel like I've watched it. I've seen it more out of the country than I have in the United States. Like it's one of those shows

Speaker2: [00:06:15] That Mexican bus

Speaker1: [00:06:16] Show. Sort of. Yeah, yeah. Ok, so the friends is the most has the most. And then I'm going to say, OK, I think that the the second most episode ID series series

Speaker2: [00:06:32] Series is not making my pants try to talk

Speaker1: [00:06:34] Series. She doesn't understand my voice is Seinfeld. Interesting. Right. Ok, wrong.

Speaker2: [00:06:40] Seinfeld is actually the least shy. One hundred of the episodes that

Speaker1: [00:06:44] Was, oh, I would have said I would have said X-Files was now or will and grace

Speaker2: [00:06:48] X-files this next and then will and grace. So it goes friends. X-files Will and Grace Seinfeld.

Speaker1: [00:06:54] Wow. Ok, well, I watched

Speaker2: [00:06:57] X-files only had two more episodes than we've had to see, you know? Wow.

Speaker1: [00:07:00] Ok, two hundred. Well, I I remember watching X-Files with my grandma and I loved that show. It's a great show. In its heyday and Seinfeld, I did watch too, because at least when it first came out, it was like a ritual that we would watch. Like people would have these watching parties, right? You go over to someone's house, they'd be like, We're watching Seinfeld because it came on at a certain time in the evening, you know, Thursday at eight o'clock or whatever. And I was in college when this was happening, right? I was in college when it first came out.

Speaker2: [00:07:32] Seinfeld started when

Speaker1: [00:07:32] We were in college. Yeah. And so people would have these Seinfeld parties and you just go and drink beer and everyone would sit around and, you know, total reverence and silence watching the show for half an hour. Yeah. And it was the thing. Same with The Simpsons. Now why is it The Simpsons on that list? That's they're still

Speaker2: [00:07:50] Going. They're still going. Simpsons has like six hundred six episodes and counting, so it blows my time also.

Speaker1: [00:07:55] But it's also animated, so that might be easier to do. You don't have actual humans. You have to

Speaker2: [00:08:00] Tell the voice actors that, Oh wow, some of those actors do like five twenty five different voices in the show, too. Wow. Ok. No, I think it's amazing, and I've seen every once in a while just watch an episode of The Simpsons to kind of see how you still doing it? It's usually pretty funny, so you know, they've got it must have like a really good writers room. So, yeah, that gives us a sense of the rare air we're breathing. So anyhow, we're up there with the Seinfeld's and The X-Files is of the world.

Speaker1: [00:08:26] Wow. Wow. Now, OK, I believe we have buried the lead here.

Speaker2: [00:08:31] Yeah, there's some lead to be buried. So we have decided

Speaker1: [00:08:35] Based on the glory of our two hundred episodes that

Speaker2: [00:08:37] We are pretty much burned out. We are going to go on what we're calling an extended hiatus from weekly podcasting. I know, I know, I know. But some good news. We're not retreating from podcasting altogether. We imagine that we will do some special episodes now and again. But I think our general feeling is we're on sabbatical. We're trying to get a couple of new creative projects launched that we're pretty excited about, and it's just logistically

Speaker1: [00:09:10] And all of a sudden

Speaker2: [00:09:11] And emotionally.

Speaker1: [00:09:12] And all of a sudden we have a book that we need to write like in about two months or something.

Speaker2: [00:09:17] Right. So we're facing and that's like one of the projects. So we came into this kind of with the idea of doing an episode once a month. Way back one, we got sucked into the whirlwind of doing it once a week. And to be honest, we love it. We've learned an amazing amount. We met so many incredible people. We've heard such lovely things. For many of you in the audience, it's been nothing but a joy, but it's also been something that's that's been a lot of work. And so we're just talking about dialing it back at this point for a while and maybe coming back to this with a new format or a new approach, or at least some kind of rekindled spirit and energy when we get back to the U.S. next year. Right. So we're going to reassess. Our hiatus will take us into the middle of 2020, which is when our sabbaticals are over and then we're going to kind of figure out where to go from there.

Speaker1: [00:10:05] Right.

Speaker2: [00:10:05] Right now, more good news. I just want just

Speaker1: [00:10:08] Because I know you're still

Speaker2: [00:10:08] Talking. I know this will be the last things I'll say. And then you can hold forth, OK? We know that people use the podcast to teach and just want to assure everyone that the catalog of the podcast will remain active. Is for the foreseeable future, so there may not be new episodes coming out, but you know what, there's a lot of old episodes and you probably haven't listened to all of them. So if you've got students who want to listen or need this for an assignment and go listen to an old episode, they're great

Speaker1: [00:10:35] And those are all archived and they will be available in perpetuity. Yes, right? Yeah. Well, I'll just I mean, I think you've already said a lot of it, but I will just reiterate what a joy it's been to do the pod, in part because we get to talk, to have gotten, to talk, to really, really brilliant, interesting thinkers and doers, activists, scholars, artists and we've had the privilege. Truly, oh yes, it's really a privilege to be able to talk to amazing people and spend, you know, forty five minutes or an hour in close conversation with them in what we like to call the the smart dinner party conversation. But these are like the kind of dinner parties you want to have. It's like hanging out with these people who we've had on the pod. So I want to thank everyone who's been a guest on the pod because it's really been an inspiration. And I know that we've both learned a lot and learned a lot more and a lot faster than we would have if we hadn't been doing this podcast. So it's been a real educational experience for us as well.

Speaker2: [00:11:37] Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker1: [00:11:38] And and and the other thing, of course, is just thinking about the listeners and our audience out there too, some of whom we meet you sometimes at these conferences and different events. And that's been a real pleasure to get to meet our listeners, too, because it is a little abstract. You don't exactly know where the where the pod is being heard or you know who's listening, when and why and how. But when we do hear from you, it's just been amazing and really nice positive feedback and reflections. So those are all those all those thoughts and messages have been really appreciated as well.

Speaker2: [00:12:11] Yes, I will second that and say it's always great to meet people who enjoy the podcast and then say, it sounds really weird to hear you talk, right?

Speaker1: [00:12:22] You don't look like how I thought you would look.

Speaker2: [00:12:25] That's true. That's true. Well, who knows? Maybe we'll bring this back as a video podcast and then you'll have to see us all the time. Yeah, right. Sure. Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:12:33] And you're just far more attractive than anyone. Imagine just so

Speaker2: [00:12:36] Into our squeaky. So in short, we're saying bye, but not good bye. Yeah. We'll keep this conversation going one way or another. And don't be surprised if we drop some kind of special events podcasts in the next six months. If something happens and we want to capture it and get it out there, that that may well be in the offing. So we'll try to give everyone an alert to that here and elsewhere on social media. We thought it fitting for our two 100th episode to have a conversation with one of the folks who we've been hoping to have on the podcast for years, who was in our first group of speakers back when we started the cultures of Energy Research Group back in what was it, maybe 20, 2012 or 2013? And this is none other than Laura Nader,

Speaker1: [00:13:19] The grand dame of energy anthropology. The founding mother, the founding mother. I mean, Laura's been doing it for a really long time, way back in the day, and she has a much deeper history even than her engagement with energy and anthropology, going back to all kinds of interesting committees and scientific panels that she's been on that you will hear about. Yes, upcoming in the pod. She's got some real. She's a real treat to get to talk to her.

Speaker2: [00:13:46] She's got some great One-Liners in there. We hear about her long engagement with energy studies going back to the 70s. The Carter administration, right? Yes, she is Ralph, Nader's sister. That's just one aspect of what brought her into this world, this crazy world of studying energy systems and their transformation. It was great to talk to her. She is marvelous, just inspiring, and that she is, you know, so with it and so active and has such a strong, critical voice. Even having done this for what happened, can't even calculate 50 years or something like that. You know, so really marvelous. And Laura reveals something that we didn't know that had happened to her. That was pretty dramatic. It comes in the last few minutes or

Speaker1: [00:14:29] So that was pretty intense. It was pretty intense.

Speaker2: [00:14:32] You just, you know,

Speaker1: [00:14:34] And also in a weird way, it connects back to Ralph Nader's origins.

Speaker2: [00:14:38] 100 percent

Speaker1: [00:14:39] The seatbelts. So I don't know. So, yeah, listen for that.

Speaker2: [00:14:43] So with that, will you give us one more of your famous Oh,

Speaker1: [00:14:46] Ok, here we go. Go, Laura. Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, and we are so overjoyed to finally be able to have the one and only Laura Nader on the podcast with us today, an opportunity we've been looking forward to a long tube for a long time. So thank you so much, Laura, for joining us here.

Speaker3: [00:15:28] Oh, you're more than welcome, Laura.

Speaker2: [00:15:30] Think I'm just going to add my thanks to the same reasons I say it's a great thrill to have you on this podcast as somebody who has been working and thinking not only as a very important political anthropologist for so many years, but also, as you know, one of the first anthropologists to really realize how important energy was as a topic. So we're all walking in your in your footsteps in this field. Can I just begin by asking you maybe to to take us back a little bit to the days when you first were working with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems? That's a kind of a long it's a mouthful. There's an acronym, Conaty. Maybe just how that all came together. And you know, was it something where you sought out that connection or they sought you out? Or what was the whole story there?

Speaker3: [00:16:21] Well, it's an interesting story, because the phone rang, I answered, and the man said, I'm calling from the National Academy of Sciences. He explained the corneas and he said, Would you serve on the corneas group? And I said, I think you had the wrong Nader. Both my brother and sister are working on the whole question of nuclear energy. And he responded. Are you the anthropologist? I said yes. He said, we need an anthropologist on this committee, so I said, OK, I'll be there. What's the meeting? And they told me when the meetings were and I went turned out, there were 300 people on the corneas. I was the only anthropologist and the only woman.

Speaker1: [00:17:06] Wow. Wow.

Speaker3: [00:17:08] Now, back at home, I think this is important for anthropologists who are also at the time in denial about what anthropology could contribute to anything. And the chair of my department said, I wish you'd get off this energy kick. Laura, you're not going to get promoted for that in this department. I said, you don't think I'm doing this to get promoted and one thing led to another. I was working late to one or two in the morning with an assistant. They wouldn't give me the key to the Xerox room, so I could use the Xerox room. It was really quite amazing, but I thought it was important as more I got into it, the more I realized we needed to hear from anthropologists. Now I might add to this that we put out a final version of the report and it was called energy choices in a democratic society. And a lot of the people didn't understand the title at the Tonys. What do you mean, democratic society? Well, if you have nuclear, you're going to need guards and you're going to need nuclear waste, et cetera, et cetera. And that's going to demean the democracy that we have built. So what did they do? They tried to hide the report. I have two boxes of energy choices in a democratic society, and I dedicated that to future generations. May they have choice. It's a very relevant today. It's both irrelevant in terms of academic and celebrities and relevant in terms of its content because although they opposed what I was saying, what we were as a group writing, it turns out we were more right than they were right.

Speaker2: [00:18:52] And it seems as though out of that whole experience also came a real practical application for your idea of studying up right of the importance of anthropologists studying experts, which was another thing that you were way ahead of your time on. So could you tell us a little bit about what you discovered about the culture of energy expertise through that whole experience?

Speaker3: [00:19:13] Yeah, I think what was very interesting is it got me interested in the laboratories. I even went to the Los Alamos lab. They came and invited me to come to talk to them, and I talked about energy and choices and what they were doing and why they weren't doing what they should be doing. And people came out of the woodwork. So the in the national labs, people were being shut up if they weren't following the line. And you can't have good science if people feel that their jobs are at risk, if they tell the truth. So that got me interested even more in the question of expertise and the burdens on people of what happens when they don't toe the line.

Speaker1: [00:19:58] Mm hmm. I mean, one of the things that became clear to me as I was reading your wonderful edited collection, the energy reader that came out a handful of years ago, I did a review of that book and I've used it a lot in my teaching, in anthropology and energy studies, and I see a through line there between studying up and your invocation to do that, as well as the content that you include in that reader. So in this reader, we hear from all kinds of academics and other professionals. So we hear from the physicist, we hear from economists, we hear from engineers, social scientists, historians, philosophers, journalists as well as business people. And I think that this is a really important moment because we get to see the really explicit connection between your interest in studying experts and then the actual application of an engaging these experts in the reader. But you also point out in the book, you say that on the one hand, we need this expert knowledge. On the other hand, there's the problem of protecting one's turf. And you say a nuclear physicist is unlikely to push for wind power. And so we could say, yeah, wind turbine technician is not going to be interested, maybe in biofuel and et cetera, et cetera. We can see this cascading effect. So I wanted to invite you to speak a little bit more about that question. Shouldn't have turf in the professional world, in the expert world, I should say the professional academic expert world, how you see that's affected, the possibilities or the potentials for our energy choices over the last few decades.

Speaker3: [00:21:36] Well, that's that's a big topic. And the reason I put all of those different types of people in that book is because I wanted to show the people that do have a turf that they've got friends outside the turf. And that's really important. Now, when I first started teaching that class, I didn't expect it to be big, but I didn't expect it to be little. But they assigned me a room for about 40 people, and I arrived and there were two hundred and fifty undergraduates who wanted to take that course. Wow, that's great. So the department was kind of surprised. We're behind the times. The young people are ahead of us, and I think it's very important to understand that. And we're seeing that today with climate change activists and the young participating in that. They're leading the way. It's their life. And everybody who said solar, that's a bunch of mirrors are not going to work. Now they have to. I wish somebody would interview the people that said those things because solar is doing very well in many countries, including our own in California. And what do you mean is just a bunch of mirrors and that goes back to the challenge. You have to have something you're working on as a scientist that's more than a bunch of mirrors. And that's why some of the scientists who were terrific Art Rosenfeld, for example, he could have been doing all kinds of very fancy sciences that took them to a Nobel, but he didn't. He got here studying rooftops. And what happens when you paint the roofs white and so on and so forth? And he had the power of self, self respect and everybody else's respect came to him because of what he did. He didn't just push to be a Nobel. He pushed to do something about the planet before many of his colleagues at the National Lab of Berkeley National Lab. So there's a lot to learn from mixing it all up.

Speaker2: [00:23:46] Right. And Simone mentioned a second ago about the you know what you were able to teach us about the the dangers of over specialization in cultures of expertise. A couple of other things that came out of a series of essays you wrote in the late 70s and early 1980s on this experience you had was about the fact that energy policy was and I'm quoting here for one of those essays grounded in the fear of deleterious change in lifestyle and options. Even though there's no reason to think that with alternative energies, there wouldn't still be a possibility for different kinds of lifestyles and options, and also that energy science itself was plagued by what you described as an inevitability syndrome. And I'm wondering if you, you know, given what you've seen in how this debate has and has not evolved over the past, well, almost 40 years now, do you still feel like those statements are true?

Speaker3: [00:24:38] Oh yeah. I think the inevitability we must grow. We continue to grow, really? What about us midway stopping and taking a look at what we're doing and the planet can take it or can't take it, and the planet can't take anymore junk in the first place. No place to put it. But what was interesting? I was invited to give a talk at the Miter Corporation and I gave a talk which was about the scientists and they printed it. And then it got reprinted and chem tech and then 40 years later got reprinted in industrial physicists. And of course, it generated a huge number of letters from scientists, mainly who thanked me for what I said. Now what's interesting is some of these are Nobel laureates, and they were complaining about the same thing I was complaining about. But even as Nobel laureates, they felt they couldn't do anything about it. So a lot of these I have a book in press at Cornell called Reaching Out Letters To and from an anthropologist, and a lot of these letters, I use the letters from the Nobel laureates, as well as from prisons and so on and so forth, up, down, sideways to show that in all of these areas, there are people who could speak up but don't. And why don't they they'll be made fun of? They won't be promoted. Even the Nobel laureate felt powerless to do anything about this. So it really does say something about how our science is organized in this country, and it's not organized in the way it is in some other countries where you have. Secure job, and that's part of the problem. So a lot of this took me into the labs, particularly here at Berkeley and Livermore, to see if we could do something about liberating the scientists. So I gave a talk at the Berkeley Lab and I was talking about tenure for scientists. And the guy on the right passed a note to the guy on the left, and he said, Can't you shut this lady up? I mean, I'm talking about giving them tenure, and they're objecting to that because then they can't control the scientists.

Speaker1: [00:26:55] It's incredible. I wanted to ask you, Laura. I'm one of the things that you've pointed out in your work in several places and times was that energy use serves as a kind of proxy or an index of a country's development or even a region's development, right? It becomes the sort of status symbol in a way of whether a region or a people or a group has become, quote unquote developed economically and maybe even socially and culturally. And this is something that I still find to be true sort of normatively that it becomes this index. And it's really interesting and troubling in a way because it's almost a recapitulation of the old Leslie white theory, isn't it, where the sort of the intensification or particular kinds of energy use mark a more higher or lower sort of reckoning on a scale of of civilizational progress or development, right? Choose your word. And I'm wondering how why is it that this particular formulation has so much traction and is still with us even long after Leslie White's evolutionist? You know, material determinist theory is in our rearview mirror?

Speaker3: [00:28:16] Well, it's interesting that Saudi Arabia is now we're selling nuclear plants to Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia is now want to be, you know, they're developing more modern, blah blah blah. So listen, I wrote a book, I put together a book. It took me twenty five years called What The Rest Think of the West since six hundred A.D. and it dealt with Japan, China, India and the Middle East, and everybody thought the West was different. I mean, the West for Japan was China, and the West for China was India, and the West for the Arabs were even for land going up the Volga. But the one thing they all agreed on independently about the West, as we know it today is the West. They have no culture, they have no civilization, but they do have technology. So they separate the whole notion of being a civilization from technology, which we don't. We think that you don't develop technology, you're developing the civilization, look at California, the techno twitch, and I call them there. Who gives a damn about most of what they're producing? Do we really want all this technology? Do we have any idea what it's doing? Well, if you talk to these guys, they think they're developing a bigger civilization, better civilization, connecting people through Facebook and Google and blah blah blah. Right? So it's here. It is true to great extent what they're saying, and I think that it's not stupid to say that civilization may end worldwide because of technology that's developed in the West. Hmm. After all, we dropped the bomb, we developed the bomb. Most most of my students don't even know we dropped the bomb really well. We don't even teach the history. And all of the story about technology is news to a lot of the young people who just get pushed into Facebook, blah blah blah and the machine that they've got in their hands and so on and so forth. They think it's great, et cetera. So I think it's, you know, it's not something that's ended. It's something that continues. And we should have paid more attention to Leslie White, which we did during his lifetime.

Speaker2: [00:30:44] No, that's certainly true. Hmm. And you know, another person that we didn't, you know, maybe pay enough attention to is Jimmy Carter and his some of his ideas about reducing energy use and efficiency. And of course, the alternative energy systems. You've described the 1970s as the energy decade, and I think there's a lot of good reasons for that. I'm interested in those legacies. If you see, you know, basically for the most part, we know that the Reagan legacy has been really powerful in terms of shutting down alternatives and doubling down on oil and gas and nuclear for for for many, many years. But do you see any through lines from what you saw back in the nineteen? 70 is on the alternative energy side of things that might have had the resilience to carry through all those dark years. You know, maybe not so much in the U.S., but elsewhere.

Speaker3: [00:31:30] Well, you mentioned Jimmy Carter is very interesting. Jimmy Carter is the last moral president we've had. True. I really mean. And it's not just because of what he did on energy, but I show a film to my class, which you may know about. A bunch of students from a little college in Maine went down to Washington looking for the energy. The solar panels that Reagan took off the Carter White House. And they found them, wow. They took them all the way back to Maine, and they sold their college. Then they went down and interviewed Jimmy Carter. I mean, Jimmy Carter on October one is going to be ninety five. It's quite amazing. And then they interviewed Jimmy Carter, and he was a nuclear engineer, for God's sake. And he knew where that was going to go. So he sold her eyes to the White House's counterintuitive. Right? And they interviewed him, and he gave his reasons for having done it and the need for more of that today. So that's not that happened recently that those kids did that. And again, it's a younger generation that's beginning to realize that what they have to do is turn their back on the pack and develop a different kind of world that they want to live in.

Speaker1: [00:32:47] That's brilliant. I hadn't heard about this project or the film, but it's a brilliant idea.

Speaker2: [00:32:53] They were able to find them.

Speaker1: [00:32:55] Yeah, it's been a long time since 1980, right? That they were able to track them down is astounding. So what a what a brilliant project. Yeah, it was. You know, as you were talking about the techno twits, that's a name I like to adopt that if I can. And the kind of, you know, techno ofelia or technological fetishization that we see in so many places around the world, but maybe particularly here in the United States and then the lack of kind of awareness of the fairly recent past of, you know, dropping the nuclear bomb wasn't that long ago one of the points that you've made and maybe you made this, you know, back in your meetings in in Washington as well. Is that an important element of anthropology is that we have this long time horizon overall in the four field approach, we have a very long time horizon looking at, you know, even prehistory, prewritten history, and that it allows us to have this vantage point of seeing civilizations rise and fall and that this is a really important perspective for us to have. And when we're thinking about energy because we're seeing these changes and we're seeing with climate change now the accommodations that need to be made, the resiliency that we need to perform. And so I wanted to ask you too, is there this is a really important point. Is there more that anthropology can give us in the study of energy in the present that you see really clearly operating today?

Speaker3: [00:34:24] Well, the journal H2A Comes Out of Europe has just published a piece that I wrote in Nineteen seventy two called Urgent Anthropology.

Speaker1: [00:34:37] Right? Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:34:39] And what's interesting is the way I was making the argument that we should study the powerful. And what's interesting is the way I ended it and so urgent anthropology. It's a study of us, of our powerful people before we disappear, and we never thought of that at the time. We never think in anthropology or right is about it's a very good place to have. This said, it's very important to continue to look at the big picture and not get so specialized that you say, I'm a cultural anthropology. I don't do that and I'm not an archaeologist and so on. We that's the best thing about anthropology is that we look at the whole picture from beginning to the present. And here at Berkeley in our department, we've hired somebody on the Caribbean, Sarah Vaughan, who does climate change work. We just hired somebody else who's also interested in that direction. The archaeologists are getting interested in more. So I think that there has been a change in the hiring of people who are doing these kinds of things, and it's very important that we do it now. The American Anthropology Association has a role to play here, which I think that they haven't been playing. They used to put out the notes, so I forgot what they called it. But now they put out a journal called Anthropology, Whatever newsletter. And it's awful. So I called the office and I said, You know, this is awful. Take a look at what they're doing anthropology today in Britain, and you'll see that's something worth looking at.

Speaker3: [00:36:17] And it shows what's happening. At the front lines, the British and and it's very interesting why why is the American Anthropology Association doing this kind of thing? We're behind the times in many ways. So I think that maybe the other associations in other countries can help bring anthropology back to its what it's supposed to be doing and hopefully get things moving again so we can reward people that are on the front lines. I mean, this is all the talk in a way, but David Graber, sure, you get a job in the United States. Are you kidding? All right. You can't get a job in the United States. He's known all over the world, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. I mean, I'm always I'm always amazed. Here's this very bright guy. And he applied to 20 some different little and big places and he couldn't get a job anywhere. Was that because he was involved in occupy? So what's happened to anthropology values? Is it being pushed to the right or is it pushing itself to the right? And of course, all this stuff on energy is going to be very controversial, especially if you have people like the president of the United States today pushing oil and gas. And I think it's important to not think that anthropologists are either apolitical or left wingers. They're not at all. We've had times in our field when we've been. We should be ashamed of the direction we're going. So there is a politics involved in all this that should be addressed.

Speaker1: [00:37:55] Well, I'm glad you brought up David Graeber. I think that's a really important example, too, of how he kind of has this pariah status now in the United States. In part, I'm sure it has to do with Occupy and his positions on that and also his involvement in labor organizing for graduate students, which I think, you know through the grapevine is part of what, you know, sort of got him in hot water with the upper administration at an unnamed Ivy League university. But yeah, this is this is really important.

Speaker3: [00:38:26] Stanford, he was here. I invited him to come and talk about debt, and one of my colleagues said, Why are you inviting this guy? He said Nobody. They had more people come to that talk than any talk. We'd had distinguished lecture here. So you need more people to speak up. That's the bottom line. Everywhere on all these topics, look at what's happening to our country.

Speaker2: [00:38:49] I want to get to that too in a second, Laura, but I want to take the advantage of talking about anthropology to mention that your most recent book and obviously there's another one on the way, but your most recent book is called Contrarian Anthropology The Unwritten Rules of Academia, which is a very provocative and intriguing title. And just speaking to this kind of contrarian ethos, which I think anthropology at its best is able to manage and sustain is something that's direly needed in a time that also dearly needs climate action and energy transition. So I think you're right, anthropologists, some anthropologists are moving in the right direction, and I personally would second your call that our professional associations actually try to take a leadership role.

Speaker3: [00:39:31] Yeah, I think that it's interesting. Everybody liked the title contrarian anthropology, except my brother. The reason they like it is it gives people permission. And I don't know if you know the work of Antonio that allowed. He's up in Norway now, and he puts out public anthropology. You know his work? Well. Sure, he's great. He had a he had an online interview I give. I had given a talk at the Academy of Sciences in New York about what happens to people who speak out when somebody doesn't want them to speak out. He published this and then he had some people comment. And it's worthy, worthy of attention because David Graber was the first commentator, and he told what happened to him and how it affected his whole life. And he said, I'll never apply for a job in the United States again because I wouldn't be saying what I'm saying if I wanted to. And other people spoke up to it that David Price and so on. So the unwritten rules of academia need to be made more obvious. Look, when I wrote up the anthropologist, I delivered it first in New York to an audience of about a thousand people. People were so upset with me they would. They shunned me. Nobody wanted to talk to me afterwards. And one one sociologist came out and said, No, no, no. We don't know how to do that kind of work.

Speaker3: [00:41:04] I said, You mean we know how to New Guinea, go to New Guinea, learn the language, avoid being eaten by the cannibals, and we don't know how to study power. That was nineteen sixty nine and I went upstairs. My mother is taking care of my baby and I told her what happened and nobody would talk to me and she said No. No matter how hard you try, you cannot please all the people, so please yourself. That's very good advice. Try to please the audience or who is going to review your book. That's one of the great things about the Birmingham press. She's very she's an anthropologist herself, and she understands these issues very well. She took that book right away, and that book has just been reviewed by somebody in Norway, and it got a rave review. So what would have happened if I had sent that to you? Press? Well, actually, the book reaching out letters to and from an anthropologist U.S. press said it wasn't. Letters don't sell, so all of a sudden we have presses, U.S. presses, university presses that are subsidized, saying they can't publish a book, not because it's no good, but because letters don't sell. So I have to tip my hat to Jim Lamp's the editor at Cornell on this. You always need people to step out of line and do the right thing, and we need to encourage that.

Speaker2: [00:42:30] Without a doubt, and Jim Lance is somebody I've worked with quite a bit. And in terms of our series on the anthropology of experts expertise, the expertise series. So it's not surprising that you found an era there, somebody who understood the value of that

Speaker3: [00:42:44] Project, right? Imagine if we don't have letters. One of the things that motivated me was my students had never seen letters and they were helping me and they were holding these letters and they said, Professor Nader, do you realize we've never seen a letter except the one that accepted us to Berkeley?

Speaker1: [00:43:03] Hmm. Right.

Speaker3: [00:43:04] So what's going to happen to history if you don't have any letters? Look at the Jefferson letters, which I still read.

Speaker2: [00:43:11] That's that's something I wanted to ask you about kind of your thoughts on a couple of things that are going on right now. You've mentioned the importance of the youth climate movement, the the Fridays for the Future, Extinction Rebellion, some of those movements that are really important right now. I was curious your thoughts about the Green New Deal? What's your thought thinking about that in terms of whether it's a way forward that people who are concerned about energy and energy transition should be supporting?

Speaker3: [00:43:38] Well, just as obvious to me, it's it's a no brainer. Of course, we should be doing the Green New Deal, and it's it gets at the core of the whole question of oil and gas and challenges oil and gas, and anybody who wants to doesn't want that to happen. It's going to be against the Green New Deal. I don't see any arguments against it, except just the kind of right wing arguments that really aren't arguments at all. They just want to ignore it. So I think that's that's it's about time, right?

Speaker2: [00:44:10] That's yeah, it's amazing the traction that oil and gas or the kind of shadow it still casts over politics today. I mean, obviously, there's an immense lobbying machine, but but also just that in spite of the, you know, increasingly obvious catastrophic effects that still large numbers of people are willing to sign on to, you know, the status quo. Do you think that is still this problem of just people's inability to imagine a change that might threaten their lifestyle?

Speaker3: [00:44:38] No, I don't really think it's about lifestyle. I think it's about philosophy. It's about what they think our country or the world should be. They're stuck in a hole. You know, Margaret Mead used to say in the in the 20th century, she said, we know socialism, communism and capitalism were invented in the 19th century to deal with 19th century issues. We need a philosophy for our own time. We never got it in the 20th century. We may be starting to develop such a philosophy now that the planet is at risk and we're all in it together. So maybe that's where we can make a contribution also. I really like that

Speaker1: [00:45:18] Idea of a of a new philosophy for New Times. What what are the component pieces that you see operating or that we need to put into this, this philosophical model, if we could get it off the ground?

Speaker3: [00:45:31] Survival. I think it's what I said in nineteen sixty two or fifty two or whatever it was, what I said was we better study power because our lives will depend on it. So survival is now an issue. It's not just coastal regions that it's an issue for. It's an issue for all of us everywhere. So for maybe the first time, we're beginning to realize that there's are these issues that now are related to the planet everywhere. Everybody doesn't matter whether you're civilizational or get rid of American exceptionalism, and just let's look at all of us together. We're all human beings. You know, some time ago, my son started asking questions, which I then started asking anthropologists, When did Homo sapiens peak? And the ecologists and the biologists? The bio anthropologists all said before farming for agriculture and political scientists said with Mozart and my student said, we haven't peaked, so you have to have a sense of humor. This is where evolutionary biology becomes important to listen to and to to contribute to survival.

Speaker2: [00:46:52] Yeah, well, put. Well put. And you know something else I wanted to ask you about Laura. You mentioned California, and obviously California has been taking, excuse me, a leadership position and pushing back against the the Trumpian attempt to, you know, reinvest in coal and all the other crazy things that are happening and is really gone on the offensive in a couple of matters, including, you know, the issue with automobiles and so forth. But in other. Part of that is is the kind of Silicon Valley mentality that we're going to solve our energy and environmental problems through kind of new, you know, smart new green technologies. And that's something that, you know, is a big influence in a big, you know, kind of power center in the Bay Area. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that about kind of how and especially for anthropologists who are working in this space. I mean, how do we deal with the those people of the kind of Elon Musk variety who kind of think that ultimately it's just a technological problem? We're going to swap out the battle technology for the good new technology, and that'll take care of everything.

Speaker3: [00:47:54] Well, first, I think that we have been very remiss in courses on technology, anthropology of technology. Archaeologists every once in a while will point to a technology that was used thousands of years ago. On the question of drought. And Bolivia and places like that or Middle East. But for the most part, social cultural anthropologists have not really done what we should do in talking about an ethnography of technology more generally. And I don't know why that is, whether it's, you know, I don't know why. Maybe you have to be a technologist to be able to critique it. I don't know. But people who do challenge automobiles, for example, I remember when that first came up, people just did not believe that it wasn't the driver, the crazy driver behind the wheel that was causing all the accidents, and it was inevitable you couldn't do anything about it. Well, it turns out you could. You could develop seatbelts and you could develop airbags and look at the thousands and thousands of lives that have been saved. But the guy that did that had to go through hell in Washington with GM trying to find something on them. You have to be perfect with nothing that they could make a big deal about in order to make some of these changes. Well, that's one of the things that professors presumably don't have to worry about because we have tenure. There's a reason why we have tenure. There's a reason why people might want to take it away. But the reason why we have is so we can have a free academy. And we're not using that power as much as we should, and we're not imagining new courses.

Speaker3: [00:49:49] I mean, I taught a course for twenty five years called controlling processes. And I started with two novels Brave New World in Nineteen Eighty Four, and I then proceeded from science and technology all the way down to the last to the personal at the very end of the course, the hugely successful course. Three hundred people, I couldn't get any support from the department the archaeologists didn't want. For whatever reason, they never made clear I had to read 300 pages, 300 papers a year. And finally, I just stopped teaching at twenty five years. Everywhere my brother goes to give a talk, people come up and say, I took a course from your sister. It's always controlling processes because they learned what they had to know to live in this country at this time. And just the other day, I got an email from a kid who said, I took your controlling processes twenty two years ago and I'm finally getting off my butt to write you a thank you note. So thank you. It made me who I am today. Wow. So that's a pedagogy that was invented. I had the imagination finally to do that. I realized the young just needed something like that to understand the world they lived in. Never mind understanding the Zapotec, the world that they lived in, and it had an amazing repercussion. So an imagined imagination for pedagogy, we need more of that, too. I didn't mean I didn't stop. I didn't stop teaching the anthropology of law, although I now call it the anthropology of law and lawlessness. That's great. More lawlessness than there is law in many places.

Speaker1: [00:51:40] Well, this is a really inspirational story, Laura, because I always hope that there's some element of activism that's involved in being a professor and teaching courses that are challenging and offering ideas to students. But sometimes you don't see the payoff right away. And I think it's great that the student appears from twenty two years ago. Yes, it took him a long time to get the note out, but clearly it shaped his, you know, approach to the world. And, you know, I like to imagine that hopefully we're having effects like that in small and maybe larger and unseen ways that we're not even aware of. So let us hope that we can all, you know, contribute to that discussion. I wanted to ask you, maybe as a final question about what those those boxes, the boxes of, you know, energy and a democratic society that the the findings that the scientists were so troubled by and that you had to sort of pack away in that you also talk about how do we make these decisions, how do we make choices? Who will make the choices of our energy futures in these in a democratic or normative normatively in normal, a democratic society like United States? So I wanted to pose that question to you, who do you think it is now who are making the decisions about our energy futures?

Speaker3: [00:53:04] Well, it's not the people, it's the corporatocracy. When you've got corporations having so much lobby influence in Washington DC, then they're going to make the decisions. And so there was a time in the 60s and 70s when we wanted just plain folks on some of those committees in Washington, and there was a movement for that and that's no longer there. So if you look at the Senate today, it's pathetic. And if you take this Boeing crash, which just happened in March, March 10th and where I lost my granddaughter and the Boeing crash, the guys didn't give a damn because they knew they had the regulatory FAA in their pocket. How did they have them in their pocket? They bribe them. So we got a list of all, all the money that Boeing had given to various Congress people and how they vote and so on. So until you get money out of politics, you're not going to be able to do very much. And until you get citizens realizing that they have to be involved. Look, one of the things we just did this week, we did Boeing and the lawlessness anthropology of law. And there's a guy named Brian Barsky, who's a computer scientist who's teaching a freshman course on the Boeing Max. And so he brought his students in with my upper division students, and we had a conversation. Amazing two day conversation in the classroom that involved. Everybody was involved because everybody in that room had flown a plane and will be flying planes, so because they were involved and and the freshmen were just great because they're from the engineering side, the computer side and they knew how to answer some of the questions. And and anthropology students knew how to answer some of the questions about tort law and so on. So you can you can have interdisciplinary events like that was an event. And the guy in computer science was great and students were good and everybody learned right. And we need more of that in the academy. Much more entered interdisciplinary with a point not just plain interdisciplinary, but this the point here was truth and justice about Boeing planes.

Speaker2: [00:55:31] Well, I mean, Laura, we didn't know about your loss, and I'm so sorry to hear that. That's that's that's terrible.

Speaker3: [00:55:38] She was a medical anthropologist who's going to Uganda on her first big job. And she gave a paper at the Denver meetings as a 20 year old about her work with the Kekua among the Inca, and she wanted to do as she said, I want to do something for the world. That's the last thing I said. I just want you to come back safe and sound. And she said, I'm only going to be gone two weeks, so. Wow. Well, anyway, that's that touches all of us because the whole plane was full of young people going to an environmental conference in Nairobi, right? Twenty three. Twenty four.

Speaker2: [00:56:16] Mm hmm. Well, Laura, I wanted to, you know, just in recognition of that. I mean, a lot of our listeners are on the younger side of things too younger than us, certainly. And and you're somebody who has had all this experience and and who has been, you know, just a huge, strong presence in fighting for environmental justice over the years to and and I just wanted to ask if you had anything you'd want to say to the younger generation in general, who might be, you know, inclined to become activists, scholars and just any, any kind of words of wisdom or advice you'd have for them.

Speaker3: [00:56:52] I think it's very important that they not believe that they question power and they question experts and what's going on around here. That was one of the questions we asked NIH because we couldn't understand what they were saying and all this stuff about sensors and blah blah blah. I say to my class is no such thing as a dumb question. So question the experts and and you'll learn more than you think you might.

Speaker1: [00:57:20] Mm hmm. Well, that's good. That's excellent advice. And I think the more that we press to do that, the young people and even us older folks pressed to do that, hopefully the better results we're going to get because they need to be interrogated, in fact, and really put to the test and made responsible for for what they do and what they don't do. So I think that's a wonderful call to action.

Speaker3: [00:57:41] Absolutely.

Speaker2: [00:57:42] Thank you so much for

Speaker1: [00:57:43] Being with us. Yeah, thank you, Laura. It was a really invigorating conversation.

Speaker3: [00:57:47] Very nice to talk to both of you. Best? Best.