The Commonwealth October/November 2022

Commonwealth

Moiya McTier and the Story of the Milky Way Galaxy

DEATH VALLEY

& WILDFLOWERS

Explore Badwater Salt Flats and Ubehebe Crater. Marvel at the panoramic views of Telescope Peak. Watch the sunrise at Zabriskie Point and walk between the multi-hued walls of Golden Canyon. Learn about the resilient desert pupfish and wildflowers. Stay at the Oasis at Death Valley.

SAND DUNES,

CONTENTS

FEATURES

14 The Milky Way and Beyond

cover story: Dr. Moiya McTier merges folklore and astrophysics to tell the story of our galaxy.

22 Why They Did It Former Republican political strate gist Tim Miller tells Dan Pfeiffer about his insights into the GOP leaders who helped Donald Trump take over the party.

34 The Female of the Species Zoologist Lucy Cooke explains the new research into the fierce and powerful females of the animal kingdom.

41 Sustainable Development and the Power of Women Wanjira Mathai discusses the de velopment and climate agenda for Africa.

DEPARTMENTS

6 The Commons

talk of the club: The Club’s Creating Citizens initiative launches speaker series, plus the president’s sister visits, and news briefs.

8 Program Listings

October and November 2022.

13 Program Info

ON THE COVER: Dr. Moiya McTier enjoys stargazing. (Milky Way image by Europe an Space Agency; McTier photo by Mindy Tucker.) ON THIS PAGE: Above: Moiya McTier. (Photo by Salud Carbajal.) Right: Tim Miller. (Photo by Sarah Gonzalez/ Peopletography.)

—MOIYA MCTIER

“Lindsey Graham said, ‘How could people get mad at Joe Biden? Maybe this will be a good moment for the country to come together.’ Well, they found things to be mad at Joe Biden about.“

—TIM MILLER

“The fun thing about photons . . . is that they take 8 minutes to get from the surface of the sun to you, but those same photons actually probably took millions of years to get from the center of the sun to the surface.“

4 Editor’s Desk by John Zipperer

EDITOR’S

JOHN ZIPPERER

What You Can Do

For nearly 119 years, The Commonwealth Club of California has been a membership organization. In fact, we are legally incorporated as a membership organization, and we exist to serve our members as well as the greater community and world around us. Our members not only help support us financially, many of them volunteer to help out at programs (checking in guests, collecting question cards during programs, pouring wine, and more). If you would like to volunteer, contact Joanne Presas, our guest and volunteers services manager, at jpresas@commonwealthclub.org and she’ll be in touch.

If you don’t have the time to help out on-site, you can help by sharing news and programs of the Club. If you’re a user of Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, follow our accounts (@cwclub on Instagram and Twitter, and facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub on Facebook); and even more important, like and share our posts. We are regularly posting information about upcoming programs, links to past programs about people in the news, and even videos and audio of recent events.

One of the best ways you can support us is to help ex pand our community of Club members, and because you are (presumably, if you’re reading this) already a member, then the best way to helpo our membership grow is to buy a membership for a friend, family member, or colleague. It’s easy. To give a gift of membership, just have your credit card handy and go to commonwealthclub.org/gift

With people returning to in-person events and travel, take a look at our upcoming travel opportunities. We’ve got an exciting lineup of fascinating, entertaining and educational trips: commonwealthclub.org/travel.

Don’t forget to check out our upcoming annual gala. There’s information about it on page 5 of this issue. We’ll be honoring some very important people and organizations that are dedicated to helping others. What can you do? A lot.

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth, 110 The Embar cadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VP, MEDIA & EDITORIAL John Zipperer

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Ed Ritger, Sarah Gonzalez.

ADVERTISING INFORMATION

John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@ commonwealthclub.org

The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2022 The Commonwealth Club of California.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org

EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY

The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub

TALK OF THE CLUB

Clockwise from top: Attendees at USF enjoyed the program reception; San Francisco Mayor London Breed with Valerie Biden Owens; Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy interviewed Owens on stage.

from his own experiences as a public servant.

Additional speakers were Lisa García Bedol la, Berkeley’s vice provost for graduate studies and a consultant for numerous presidential campaigns and statewide ballot efforts; and Duf Sundheim, a member of the Advanced Mediation Practice Group in the federal courts and former chair of the California Republican Party. Together, these esteemed participants took attendees on a journey through our elec toral process and provided key takeaways from their experiences in politics.

Valerie Biden Owens Shares Stories

Valerie Biden Owens—political strategist, former campaign manager (you know her main client as President Joe Biden, her broth er), and Biden Institute chair at the University of Delaware—came to town in early September for a conversation with Commonwealth Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy at the University of San Francisco (see photos above). Owens, the first woman to manage a presidential campaign, discussed “Family, Faith and Responsibility” in her program, which you can watch or listen to at commonwealthclub.

CIVICS

Creating Citizens Speaker Series

Young people’s voices are an integral part of our democracy. Yet Gen Z and Millennial voters consistently turn out to vote at lower

rates than older generations. To inspire youth civic engagement, The Commonwealth Club teamed up with the Associated Students of the University of California Vote Coalition and Berkeley Women in Politics to launch the Creating Citizens Speaker Series at UC Berke ley. This series will give UC Berkeley students and community members the opportunity to listen to and ask questions of leaders in politics, media, and education as they learn how to become better, more-involved citizens. As the home of decades of activism and civic engagement, Berkeley is a welcoming environment for this dialogue to occur.

The inaugural panel, “Your Vote, Your Voice,” took place on October 4, 2022, at UC Berke ley. Accomplished individuals from across the political spec trum came together to inspire the next generation of voters and citizen leaders. Special guest California Attorney General Rob Bonta discussed the importance of voting and civic engagement, particularly in 2022, drawing

The Club’s Creating Citizens initiative is generously supported by the Koret Founda tion. We look forward to welcoming com munity members and students from around the Bay Area to participate in future series programs. Find past and future events at commonwealthclub.org/education

NEWS

Briefly Noted

C

ongratulations to Susie Cranston, a member of the Club’s Board of Gov ernors and the newly named executive vice president and chief operating officer of First Republic Bank. Cranston has been with First Republic since 2013, most recently serving as senior executive vice president of First Republic Private Wealth Management . . . The Club re cently surpassed the milestone of 150,000 subscribers to its you tube channel—you can become the latest subscriber at youtube. com/commonwealthclub . . . more than 500 people showed up for our largest event in years, the Club’s travel-themed Bay Lights Mixer on September 30, to enjoy an evening of music, art, food and wine, and the tunes from DJ Rosa La RumoRosa

PHOTOS BY DONALD BOWDEN

The speaker series provides the opportunity to hear and ask questions of leaders.

TALK

Leadership of The Commonwealth Club of California

CLUB OFFICERS

Board Chair

Martha C. Ryan Vice Chair

John L. Boland Secretary

Dr. Jaleh Daie

Treasurer

John R. Farmer

President & CEO

Dr. Gloria C. Duffy

BOARD OF GOVERNORS

Robert E. Adams

Willie Adams Deborah Alva rez-Rodriguez Scott Anderson Dan Ashley

Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman David Chun Charles M. Collins Mary B. Cranston Susie Cranston Claudine Cheng

Dr. Kerry P. Curtis

Dorian Daley Evelyn Dilsaver Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Flem ing

Leslie Saul Garvin Gerald Harris Peter Hill Mary Huss Michael Isip Nora James

Lata Krishnan

Alexis Krivkovich

Dr. Mary Marcy

Lenny Mendonca

Michelle Meow

Anna W.M. Mok

DJ Patil

Ken Petrilla Bruce Raabe

Skip Rhodes

Bill Ring George M. Scalise George D. Smith Jr.

David Spencer

James Strother

Hon. Tad Taube

Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers

Don Wen

Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter

PAST BOARD CHAIRS & PRESIDENTS

* Past Chair ** Past President

Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney**

Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Evelyn Dilsaver* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Rose Guilbault*

Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu**

ADVISORY BOARD

Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen

Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Nancy Thompson

October & November 2022

UPCOMING PROGRAMS

On these pages is a preview of in-person and online programs scheduled for October and November 2022 at The Com monwealth Club of California.

To see more, including event details and to buy tickets, visit commonwealthclub.org and/or subscribe to our weekly news letter at commonwealthclub.org/ mail

YOUR GUIDE TO IN-PERSON & ONLINE EVENTS AT THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB

Safety Protocols for in-person attendance

• We follow best practices laid out by the CDC and state and local guidelines.

We strongly recommend vaccination for guests, staff, and volunteers.

Masks are strongly encouraged while indoors (if you do not have one and would like one, inquire at our front desk for a complimentary mask).

• We reserve the right to require different rules for specific events as necessary.

Our LEED Gold-certified building is designed to cool with outside air, using digitally controlled moveable windows and large ceiling fans. We are deploying additional HEPA filters inside to scrub the air. This is all in addition to increased cleaning of surfaces throughout the building.

PROGRAMS INFORMATION

The Commonwealth Club organizes nearly 500 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs

PROGRAM DIVISIONS

In addition to its regular lineup of pro gramming, the Club features a number of divisions that produce topic-focused pro gramming.

CLIMATE ONE

Climate scientists, policymakers, activists and citizens discussing energy, the economy and the environment.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/CLIMATE-ONE

CREATING CITIZENS

The Club’s new education department.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/EDUCATION

INFORUM

Inspiring talks with leaders in tech, culture, food, design, business and social issues targeted towards young adults.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/INFORUM

MEMBER-LED FORUMS

Volunteer-driven programs that focus on particular fields.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MLF

MICHELLE MEOW SHOW

Talks with LGBTQ thought leaders from a wide range of fields of expertise.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MMS

WEEK TO WEEK

Political roundtable paired with a preprogram social.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/W2W

are held online and throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Marin County, and the East Bay. Standard programs are

typically one hour long and frequently include interviews, panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session.

RADIO, VIDEO, & PODCASTS

Watch Club programs on KAXT, KTLN and KCAT TV every weekend, and monthly on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast. Select Commonwealth Club programs air on Marin TV’s Education Channel (Comcast Channel 30, U-Verse Channel 99), C-SPAN, and on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at youtube.com/commonwealthclub

CreaTV KAXT/KTLN TV

HARD OF HEARING?

To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Mark Kirchner seven working days before the event at mkirchner@commonwealthclub.org.

PODCASTS

Subscribe to our free podcast service on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify to automatically receive new programs: commonwealthclub.org/podcast-subscribe

Hear Club programs on more than 230 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States (commonwealthclub.org/watch-listen/radio). For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to:

KQED (88.5 FM) Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park) Thursdays at 7 p.m. KSAN (107.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KALW (91.7 FM)

Inforum programs select Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

KNBR (680 and 1050 AM) Sundays at 5 a.m.

KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM) Sundays at 5 a.m. TuneIn.com Fridays at 4 p.m.

TICKETS

Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all events—including “Members Free” events—require tickets. In-person programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705. Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. Select events include premium seating, which refers to the first several rows of seating. Pricing is subject to change.

DR. MOIYA MCTIER The Story of Our Milky Way Galaxy

GERALD HARRIS: M oi

ya McTier is an astrophysicist, folk lorist, and science communicator based in New York City. After graduating from Har vard as the first person in the school’s history to study both astronomy and mythology, Moiya earned her Ph.D. in astrophysics at Columbia Uni versity, where she was selected as a National Science Foundation research fellow. When she’s not researching space or imagining new worlds, Moiya can be found watching trashy reality TV with her cat, Cosmo. She’s a real person. Welcome, Moiya.

MOIYA MCTIER: Thanks so much, Gerald.

I’m happy to be here.

HARRIS: What I want to do to get you started is just to allow you to introduce yourself in the opening comments. So who are you? Tell us what you want us to know.

MCTIER: My story starts in rural Pennsylvania.

I grew up in a cabin in

the

middle of the woods. I didn’t have run ning water. I didn’t have TV. But I did have a really big imagination. And I had a mom who shared with me her love of read ing. So I don’t think anyone in my fami ly was surprised when I said, “Oh, I wrote a book.”

But I got out of my hometown. I went to Harvard, where I studied both astronomy and mythology. Before I graduated, I wrote a science fiction novel that was set on a real planet outside of our solar system that I researched. And then I went to get my Ph.D. in astronomy at Columbia, where I specialized in studying the motion of stars around the galaxy and how that affects the habitability of different planets.

One thing I really want people to get out of my story, if they’re interested in pursuing a career in STEM, is that there is no time that’s too late to start. So many of my astronomy colleagues

PHOTO BY

ON UNSPLASH

got interested in space when were five years old and looked up at the night sky for the first time. I was 19 when I started. I know people who went to astronomy grad school when they were in their thirties and forties; so it is never too late to get into STEM.

HARRIS: We had a an astronaut here who basically said the same thing with a bunch of teenagers we had in the room. He said he was a C student in high school, and he didn’t really get going until late in his col lege career, and then he ends up being an astronaut. So he was echoing what you’re saying in terms of really, really encourag ing people.

Let me ask you this. I read through at least more than half of the book, and then I was learning so much that I was having a hard time sleeping at night, because I was thinking of all the great ideas in this book. There’s a lot of stuff in there and I’m sort of, you know, a science person; I’ve got my Scientific American here and that kind of thing.

But if you were to say to the curious person, here are two or three things I re ally want you to take from this whole top ic—because a lot of people don’t know how to think about this topic, they don’t know what they want to grab a hold of—give us your top two or three. You say, “Hey, really think about these.”

thing that I would want peo ple to know about space is how big it is in space. Like it’s physical volume, but also in time.

I feel we as humans have a really hard time imagining these huge scales. But I hope that by reading the book you get a sense for how far apart stars are and how far apart different galaxies are and how long it takes things to happen in space. I mean, it can take 10 to 100 million years for a planet to form around a new star. So I hope people get a sense of scale.

I also hope that they start seeing space as a dynamic thing. So many people think of space as static, that it’s standing still and it’s not changing, but space is moving and changing all the time. Our Milky Way galaxy is moving toward the Andromeda Galaxy at 100 kilometers per second. That’s really fast. Our sun is moving around the galaxy. We do one full orbit every 250 million years. So we’re moving. But these scales are huge. And I would hope that by getting more comfortable with those scales, people feel less intimidated by space and that they maybe start to zoom out from their own individual perspective a little bit.

HARRIS: That’s something I took from the book as well, which is that maybe there’s something about the human experience that we don’t understand that we’re moving. So just in the short period of time you and

I have been sitting her, we are a very long way from where we were 5 minutes ago. All of this is moving, including not only is the Earth moving, but the solar system is moving. The solar system, the galaxy—it’s all moving on different

So can you say more about these distances? Because it seems to me that when someone says light speed is traveling at 186,000 miles per second, one way I kind of think about that is someone told me that when the sun strikes my face, those pho tons left [the sun] about eight and a half to 9 minutes ago. Can you give us more about how far this is?

MCTIER: [Laughter.] Really, really far. One calculation that young astronomers often can do when they’re in their early classes is to calculate how many stars will collide when the Milky Way and Andromeda gal axies merge in about 5 billion years. I re member starting to do that calculation and assuming that it’s going to be thousands or hundreds of thousands of stars having collisions, because it seems like that’s what should happen. Each of these galaxies has hundreds of

But I was proven wrong. I did the calculation where I took into account how fast these galaxies are moving and how far apart stars are on average in each of these galaxies. What I learned and what most as tronomers get when they do that cal

culation, is that only a handful of stars will actually collide. Because even though there are so many stars, they’re so far apart. I think that illustrates how spread apart things are.

The fun thing about those photons that take 8 minutes to get from the sun is that they take 8 minutes to get from the surface of the sun to you, but those same photons actually probably took millions of years to get from the center of the sun to the sur face.

HARRIS: Wow. I mean, it’s amazing that we don’t think about something that is hit ting our face is over a million years old. MCTIER: That photon has gone through a lot before it reaches you. Imagine when astronomers are studying galaxies that are billions of light years away, collecting the photons that were emitted by those galax ies a billion years ago. That’s how long it takes the light to get to us, because that’s how far away they are. But even then, those photons, they make it billions of light years to come to us, and they get stopped from hitting the ground by our body being in the way or by our telescope being in a way.

I think that that’s just so beautiful that these photons go on such a journey and then get trapped on our puny little human instrument that we make.

HARRIS: Can you say more about that? Because one of the things I kind of puzzle

DR. MOIYA MCTIER shares the “personal story” of the Milky Way galaxy, the colossal place we call home, and helps us understand better the universe around us. Excerpted from the August 17, 2022, Technology & Society Memberled Forum program “Moiya McTier: Understanding the Milky Way.”

Dr. MOIYA MCTIER , Ph.D., Astrophysicist; Folklorist; Author, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy

GERALD HARRIS, President, Quantum Planning Group; Chair, Technology & Society Memberled Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator

here is how small we are, because we’re re ally, really, really, really, really, really, really teeny and we don’t live that long, and our brain is kind of a blunt instrument for what it is we’re trying to figure out. So when you think about human beings, how should we think about ourselves in relation to the universe?

That’s a kind of a crazy question, but I re ally don’t have an answer to it once I realize how insignificant we are.

MCTIER: It’s actually the type of question that I think humans should be asking and one of the things I tried to address in

told from the perspective of the galaxy— compares the human lifespan to that of a mayfly, which only lives for about a day here on Earth. The Milky Way says, “Do you ever wonder why the mayfly bothers to do anything? I mean, it lives its whole life in one room of your house. Why does it bother?” Then the Milky Way says that that’s how it feels about us humans. It’s amazed that we even bothered to do any thing at all.

What I was trying to do with that was say, Yeah, we are tiny—physically in space and in time, we don’t live for that long. But that really does mean that all of the mo ments we have are precious and that we should make the most of the time we have and make the most of the possible connec tions with the humans that we can.

HARRIS: I think that that’s wonderful.

The beautiful thing you did in the book is there’s almost a time sequence from the beginning and where’s it going to the end. As I’m reading the book, I feel like I’m kind of moving through really large scales of time. But along the way, you stop off at some very interesting points.

So when you start talking about grav ity and black holes and dark energy and those kinds of things, tell us how you put those things in perspective, because it’s such a dense area, but you put it in se quentially.

The book was in the form of an autobiography. I wanted to be inspired by autobiographies of humans, and those usually are written chronologically. It starts with the subject’s birth and then goes until whenever the others were ending their au tobiography.

But the Milky Way has this extra, I don’t oomph to it. Like it knows what’s going to happen next. Unlike a human writing their own autobiography. So the Milky Way can actually proj ect forward to say how it is going to die eventually when the uni verse ultimately ends or loses all of its energy.

So it made sense for me to go chronologically through

that.

HARRIS: When you start talking about the structure, the thing itself, and black holes, dark matter, dark energy, how it shapes things and how it doesn’t interact with any thing—you get kind of descriptive. And I was thinking, it’s very interesting; some times you can describe something, what it does, but that still doesn’t mean you know what it is.

MCTIER: There’s a lot of that in astrono my. We know how dark matter behaves. We can see it interacting gravitationally with stars and other galaxies, but we don’t know what dark matter is made of. We cannot see it. It doesn’t interact with light. Photons seem to just pass right through it as if they don’t care that the dark matter is there. But we can still see gravitational in fluence. So that’s how we learn about it.

HARRIS: So there’s a lot of mathematics here.

MCTIER: There is a lot of math behind what goes in the book, yes, but there is no math in the book.

MCTIER: When I was reading through it, I was thinking, well, there’s a lot of math be hind figuring out the fact that there’s dark energy in the universe. Someone had to do a calculation that something seemed to be missing here based on how the universe is operating. It must be something there. So you have some sense of what percentage it must be and all these kinds of things.

Talk about your background and being sort of a mathematician as well. You know, how you grew up, and a lot of people say people don’t like math, girls are not good at math. But that’s obviously not true of you.

MCTIER: Well, it’s not true in gener al. Girls are great at math—girls, young women, non-binary folks—they have in terest in STEM and they are really good at it. The problem, the reason we don’t see a lot of women in STEM careers or people of color in STEM careers is because it’s not a very welcoming en vironment for us.

I love science. I enjoyed much of doing research, but I got sick and tired of the way that I was treated in some spaces and I know that I didn’t get the

worst of it. I know that there are other young researchers who are coming up who are having to fight to stay in this field, in this community, as they’re dealing with all sorts of nonsense.

So I think that it’s not a lack of interest. It’s not a lack of skill. It is a matter of what we call the “leaky pipeline” in academia, letting people slip through the cracks.

HARRIS: It’s sort of lack of, I guess I would call it a welcoming, encouraging environ ment for people who don’t look like what

went to college. I came from a really rural town, a public school that definitely did not prepare me as well as my other peers had been prepared by their fancy prep schools. I walked into those physics class rooms and didn’t see anyone who looked like me. When I went to meetings, when I was looking for potential advisors, I didn’t see anyone who looked like me. I had one professor my freshman year tell me that I would never make it as a physicist because I was struggling too hard with the coding. I had never used a computer as anything other than a word processor before that year, so I was teaching myself coding on the fly. I had another professor my senior year who told me that I would never make it through grad school.

And here I am, Dr. Moiya, with a Ph.D., so these people say these things to young, impressionable students and researchers coming up through the field, and that can crush their confidence. The fact that I’m still here today is because of the small but grow ing community of women and people of color in astronomy who supported me and surrounded me in that moment and helped me see

“I love science. I enjoyed much of doing research, but I got sick and tired of the way I was treated in some spaces, and I know that I didn’t get the worst of it.”

—MOIYA MCTIER

that those professors were wrong and that I did bring value to the field.

HARRIS: Absolutely. I’m so glad you’re able to express that, because I think we need people to hear that encouragement from you, to see your success, to validate their interest, to validate their drive.

Let me ask you kind of a tough question here. It has to do with the fact that as I was reading the book, I felt that I’m learning a lot about the Milky Way, but I’m also learn ing a lot about you and your personality, because, as you know, the Milky Way actu ally doesn’t have a personality; I don’t know that personality is exactly like yours, but I found it entertaining.

You’re pretty matter-of-fact; facts are im portant to you, logic is important to you, common sense is important to you. And I kind of [understand] that you don’t suffer fools very easily.

MCTIER: [Laughter.] I used that ex act same expression the other day. I was talking to my mom. I was like, “Mom, I just don’t suffer fools.”

HARRIS: That was the impression I got from them. What that brought up for me, though, is your comment about mytholo

and folklore in college. As a folklore major my specialty was fictional world building. But I see mythology and folklore, these sto ries that people have been telling and pass ing down through cultures, as an early at tempt at science. They weren’t just making stories up—I mean, some of them were, they were for pure entertainment. But a lot of mythology that sticks with us today was useful. It was based on observations that people made of the world around them. These stories were meant to try and explain what was happening.

This is why we have myths about the changing of the seasons or thunderstorms or eclipses. This was their attempt at trying to make sense, but it was also a way of en coding important practical knowledge, like how to use space to keep time or navigate or connect with other members of your culture.

There is this one example that I really love of Aboriginal Australian mythology, that they had a constellation in their sky and it was actually a dark constellation. So it’s not made of stars that you connect the dots with. It’s actually like a void that is shaped like an emu. They call it the Emu constellation. And that constel lation appears in the sky around the same time that the Earth emus started laying eggs every year. The Aboriginal Australians would be able to use those eggs as nourishment. The constellation reappearing—they didn’t have Google

calendars, they didn’t have cell phones to put reminders on, so they needed this con stellation to be like, Oh, okay, we have the food now.

There’s so many other examples of that around the world and throughout time up until a few hundred years ago. And that is why I think that mythology is a type of sci ence. I’m glad that we have science today in the way that we do with telescopes and beakers and hard numbers. Because I’m a nerd. I love numbers. But I also see and appreciate the value in indigenous knowl edge and in traditional knowledge; I like to say that if you squint your eyes and turn your head to the side, you can look at those myths and see some scientific facts.

HARRIS: It’s interesting the way that we think about mythology sometimes. In in dustrialized societies, we don’t see stars. We don’t see the Milky Way. We don’t see these things. So we’re out at the bar or whatever we’re doing at night, but we’re not [seeing the night sky]. In other societies where they don’t have all this stuff, they can look up every night and see that. How do you think that affects consciousness?

MCTIER: I like the Dark Sky Association estimates that about 80 percent of the night sky for people around the world is affected by both light and air pollution. This makes it harder to see the stars, which makes it harder for us to connect with them.

I love that you ask how that affects our consciousness. I think it has had a real ef fect. Psychologists have studied how the loss of different types of connections for modern day humans has had a negative impact on psyches. One of those lost con nections is connection with nature. You can [see] this in terms of getting out to the forest or like seeing greenery. But the night sky is also a really important part of nature. So many of our ancestors connected to the night sky daily, and it was a huge part of their lives. And that’s a part of the human experience that so many of us are missing now.

But I think that experience of look ing up at the night sky, coupled with our modern scientific understanding of the universe, would be so powerful in helping

“I see mythology and folklore, these stories that people have been telling and passing down through cultures, as an early attempt at science. They weren’t just making stories up.”

—MOIYA MCTIER

people shift their perspective to thinking about things bigger than us. When as tronauts come back from space, they talk about something called the overview effect, where they can look at every single per son on earth through a tiny little window on the International Space Station. And when you’re up there, these identities that we have, like race or sexuality or religion, those start to seem less important when you can see the whole picture, and instead you see us as humans. You stop seeing bor ders, you stop seeing these conflicts that are real for us, but in the universe’s mind, they’re really petty.

I think if we could have more people look up at the night sky regularly and feel connected to it while knowing that it is an ever-expanding universe, billions of light years across—ah, that’s such a powerful message.

HARRIS: I completely agree. I was hum bled by it. Several years ago, we were off in northern California and at night the stars came out at a particular time. When I first saw it, they were so bright and it was just like they were right on my eyeball. I’ll be honest with you, I was initially frightened by it. But it also humbled me in a sense of [not only how] small I am, but just how wonderful existence is.

The fact is, some people are humbled occasionally by the magnificence of the universe. Maybe it leads to some thought process that’s not healthy.

MCTIER: Yeah. I think Kendrick Lamar should write a song with me about how space makes you humble.

HARRIS: Let me throw out a topic that is very popular, that people are talking about, which is the Webb telescope—what we’re learning, what we’re seeing. Give us your take on that and what it means for us and what we should do with it.

MCTIER: Love to. The James Webb Space Telescope or JWST is this amazing instru ment that we launched out into space on Christmas Eve last year, and it has in the last month or so given us some of its first images. And they’re gorgeous. What I love about them is that they aren’t showing us spaces of the sky that we haven’t seen be

fore. What JWST is doing is showing us those same parts of the sky in more detail than even some astronomers ever imag ined we would have. There’s this beautiful image of the deep field; in this tiny patch of sky that is as big as a grain of sand held out at arm’s length, you can see thousands of galaxies. Some of those galaxies were the first galaxies ever formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang; we can measure how far away they are. This is helping us understand more about what the universe was like early on. It’s helping us understand more about how galaxies form and how they can change.

But JWST is not just a one trick pony. It is also looking at star formation. There’s another gorgeous image of the Carina Neb ula. Some people call it cliffs or whatever. But we are seeing through the clouds of gas and dust that we couldn’t see through be fore to see new stars forming.

There’s another really great instrument on JWST that doesn’t take images at all. It’s a spectrograph, so it’s actually looking a lot at the atmospheres of planets to try and figure out what elements you can find in those atmospheres. We got this gorgeous spectrum of a planet that showed us that it had water vapor in its atmosphere and we could see it so clearly, which is something we’d never be able to do before JWST.

I could talk about this forever, but it’s a really exciting telescope that’s helping us get a closer look at space that astronomers have wanted for a long time.

HARRIS: Yeah, and you just said something that I don’t think people understand, which is those images are from a very tiny look at just a very small little area. There’s a lot more, so that if that’s what’s in this small little area, oh, my God. Wow.

MCTIER: Exactly; wow. The thou sands of galaxies in that one tiny patch—we have in astronomy some thing called the cosmological principle. It tells us some basic tenets of the universe. One of them is that the universe is isotro pic. That means that the universe is the same everywhere. So if we are seeing thou sands of galaxies in this one little patch of sky, then that means all of the other patch es of sky also have thousands of galaxies in them.

HARRIS: That’s why when people say if there’s not another planet out there with some life on it, this is a big waste of space, right? We just can’t be that unique, can we?

MCTIER: There are a couple hundred bil lion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and there are hundreds of billions of gal axies in the universe. And we think that on average, every star has a couple of planets. So there are trillions of planets out there. If we are the only planet that hosts life—like what? How?

Yeah, you’re right. There’s no way we’re that special or unique. But I do have to make my advisor proud and say, as a sci entist, we have not found evidence of alien life.

HARRIS: Let me go back to that Webb photograph, because this is something that I’m confused about. I think it was either the BBC or someone had a writeup about this and they said you see the ones that are red in color versus these others. So some thing about this is an image, this is not a photograph. So that tells us in a sense some data and some information around certain spectrums that allowed us to create these images. So a galaxy that may be really way out there close to the beginning of the Big Bang, and it’s probably not still there in that exact form, because that’s a long time ago.

“We’re not seeing those images how they are today— some of those red galaxies, we are seeing them how they were like 5 to 10 billion years ago.”

—MOIYA MCTIER

day. Is that correct?

MCTIER: Yes, you are correct. We are not seeing those images how they are to day—from that deep field image, some of those red galaxies, we are seeing them how they were like 5 to 10 billion years ago. It’s almost like imagine you have the fast est camera in the world that can take the fastest picture. But you’re trying to take a picture of a moving train. By the time you snap the picture and it shows up on your screen and you take a look at it, the train is far gone. But you still took a picture of that train.

HARRIS: That’s what I was trying to get to, because I was thinking, do people really understand that this is an image, it’s not the same as a photograph?

MCTIER: I was a little confused, actually, when you asked the question about the distinction between an image and a pho tograph. And then you said that this image has data in it. Photographs also have data in them, because the way that modern photographs are taken is that the camera collects photons and essentially puts those photons into different blocks on a grid to show you like what the image looks like. We’re essentially just taking pictures of

space and looking at the photons in each grid to see what kind of photons are there.

HARRIS: The limitations of these things we have as eyes, what we can see, this brain we have, is limited; so I kind of got the im pression that even though we’re kind of in a learning mode—you talk about this at the end of the book that you really want us to kind of stay in this learning mode. But are we handicapped in some kind of way by the human desire to think that what we see is all there is?

MCTIER: For a long time, we only knew about space in terms of photons. We were only collecting information about the light out there in space. Then we started thinking about other ways to collect in formation, and [we] started looking at gravitational waves to see how mass and matter gets distributed around space. We now have instruments that can measure temperature, that can measure electric currents and the strength of electric fields. These are senses that we don’t have as hu mans, but other animals do. There are sharks that have this sense of electric im

them. We can sense mag netic fields and electrical fields.

But just because we don’t have the sens es doesn’t mean we don’t have scientific instruments to measure those quantities. So now we are putting those types of in struments on telescopes, and we’re not just getting light data anymore. We are not just limited by what we could see, even though we have been exploring in different re gions of the electromagnetic spectrum for a hundred years.

HARRIS: Here’s a question from one of our online listeners: Do you have a favor ite constellation? Someone says “one that might be worthy of a tattoo.”

MCTIER: [Displays a tattoo near her shoul der].Yes. I have a tattoo of the constellation Orion, which is more than just Orion’s belt. That is my favorite constellation.

I am terrible to go stargazing with. I got this tattooed on my body because it’s the only constellation I can reliably ID in the night sky. I’ve always had a very personal connection to Orion because it comes up in the sky in January around my birthday. I’ve always loved Greek mythology, espe cially the story of Orion, the Hunter.

TIM MILLER

TIM MILLER SAYS THE GOP

started down a path to disaster in the early 2000s. He now seeks to answer a simple question: “Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?” Excerpted from the July 11, 2022, program “Tim Miller: Inside the New Republican Party.”

TIM MILLER, Writer-at-large, The Bulwark; Political Analyst, MSNBC; Host, “Not My Party” on Snapchat; Communications Director, Jeb Bush 2016; Author, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

In Conversation with DAN PFEIFFER, Co-host, “Pod Save America”; Author, Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

DAN PFEIFFER: I’m pleased to be joined by my friend Tim Miller, who is a longtime Republican consultant— TIM MILLER: Former. [Laughter.]

PFEIFFER: —former Republican consul tant, and author of the new book Why We Did It. Tim cuts through the past few decades of political shifts, compromises, and deci sions made by the GOP and how it set us on a collision course for 2016, Donald Trump, and everything that happened on January 6. Tim’s book is great; it is a funny, raw, accu rate diagnosis of politics, the Republican Par ty, and really more than almost anything I’ve read over the last few years, helps explain how we got to this moment right now, from the point of view of someone who was there to see it all in the front row.

Tim, . . . you’re a former Republican con sultant. You have been about as vocal against your party as any member of the Republi can establishment not named Liz Cheney has been over the last many years. But be

The True Confessions of a Former Republican Hitman

fore we get to the former part, let’s ask: Why did you become a Republican in the first place? What led you down that path to cur rent Republican politics?

MILLER: Yeah, I was a pretty dorky child, and I was attracted to politics at a young age. My interest in politics began when I had a bet with my grandmother. She thought that George H.W. Bush would beat Bill Clinton. I just sensed that was not going to happen; I don’t know why. So we had a $1 bet, which I won—and that kind of got me addicted to politics.

Frankly, if you look back to ’96 and 2000, which are the first campaigns that got me into politics, I was attracted to this notion of the Republican Party as being one of free markets and free people, one that helped get rid of the limits on individuals’ ability to achieve success.

My father was—sorry for the cliche—an up-from-his-bootstraps kind of guy [who] gained success. So that part of it appealed to me, this notion that we were a shining city on a hill—remember when Republicans thought we were a shining city on a hill and people might want to come here, and that it would be appealing to be here because of our freedoms and our society?

PFEIFFER: Reagan never mentioned the wall around [the city].

MILLER: With moats with alligators. [Laughter.]

So that [openness] appealed to me.

And then, I think once I got into politics, it very quickly went from those kind of ear nest reasons of being drawn to the Republi cans, to really enjoying the game and enjoy ing the sport of it and wanting to win and to beat the other side.

I think that during our era, that kind of comment was more common on my side of things than on your side. But this notion that, oh, you know, we liked The West Wing; and for whatever reason your family was Re publican or Democrat, you ended up on a team and now you’re in Washington. And once you’re on a team in Washington, it’s hard to get off it. You know, you’re not going to get hired by the Democrats.

I interviewed one guy for the book who is a very high-level Republican now, who said he’s never voted for a Republican for presi dent in his life. [Laughter.] That’s a pretty odd little fact about something in politics.

PFEIFFER: Did he vote for Democrats or did he vote for independents?

MILLER: In 2008, Palin freaked him out, and he thought it was cool to vote for the first Black president. He sat out 2012; and then Trump came around and all of a sudden, he’s working for a Republican governor at the top levels of the party. He voted for the person he worked for.

I asked him, “Could you have worked for Obama, do you think?” He said, “Yeah. I kind of barely fell on this one side of the line in 2008 when the stakes just didn’t feel as high.” I know that you probably didn’t feel that way in 2008, but if you look at McCain and Obama, I think it’s easy to understand how people rationalize that, right? John Mc Cain was a person of dignity and integrity, serves the country. He believes that climate change is a problem and that we should have a cap-and-trade deal. He wanted to welcome immigrants. He didn’t think that we should

PHOTO

SARAH

“I interviewed one very high-level Republican who said he’s never voted for a Republican for president in his life.”

torture people. The notion that there were these like huge fundamental differences be tween those two—there were real differenc es. But you can see how someone kind of wrapped up in the sport of it might decide, okay, I’m a person who has a job to do and I enjoy that job, and that’s what I’m going to do first and foremost. I definitely found myself in that camp.

PFEIFFER: You obviously have been on ca ble a lot over the last six years. You’ve been part of many political groups attacking Trump. You have been very vocally critical of other members of your party on Twitter.

But writing this book is like a different step, right? The first half of the book is about you and your journey, about how you ended up at this point. But the second half is really about some of the people who you know, you have worked with, some were maybe men tors to you or people you trusted, who have gone on to sort of debase themselves in ser vice of Trump. To write about them in these explicit ways burned some bridges; maybe they were burned already.

But just talk to me a little about the pro cess of deciding to write the book and maybe if there’s been fallout or blowback from some of the people you have written about?

MILLER: I felt like there were two elements of the book that kind of represent this first half and second half, that also represent my motivations for doing it.

One is, I felt there was a sense of atonement, right? Even though I had fought Trump, I still kind of felt icky looking back on some of the stuff that I did. You know how the publishing business goes; I got a call from an agent, “I want you to write a book that’s like the ten [worst] Trump grifters in America; it will sell a million copies.”

I was like, That’s kind of appealing. But then I thought, Oh man, I don’t think I can really write that book in good conscience without reckoning with my complicity and how I was a part of this. I feel like for readers of good faith, if I’m going to get anyone who is persuadable—like maybe some “Pod Save America” listeners would like that book— but if I was going to get anybody that is per suadable, I need to take some accountability.

So the first half of it was really kind of reflecting on myself. If I’m going to under stand how my friends and mentors went along with something that’s immoral or un ethical or evil, I have to look back at how I did. That was kind of the motivation for the first part.

The second part was really a curiosity. Rather than write about, you know, the Ste

phen Millers and the worst of the worst, I wanted to write about people that I felt there was a little bit of a gray area, like the peo ple who knew better, the people who told me they knew better because, despite having lived all this for six years, I still didn’t feel like I fully understood why literally all of my friends and colleagues went along with that. I mean, 97.5 percent of the people that I worked with went along with us.

PFEIFFER: When you say went along with it, that is degrees of people who you write about, like your friend Caroline Wren, whose name is on the January 6 Stop the Steal permit, to people who just stayed in the party and worked for random members of Congress or leadership, right?

MILLER: Yeah, exactly. I think that there’s different gradations of how they justified it. Somebody like Caroline, obviously, which we can talk about, got basically sucked up into the cult and fully believed all of the MAGA nonsense.

So my other friends, many of whom are not on the record in the story, but who I wanted to speak to me honestly, decided that they couldn’t work for Trump. But that wouldn’t stop them from working for ran dom senators [like] Cory Gardner—you can list all of the different Republican senators who are varying degrees of normal.

I kind of got it, right? At some level, you’re like, [they’re making] money and they have a job and a career. So it’s a surface level. I got it. But I felt like I really wanted to dig deeper and understand [if] maybe there were things that I didn’t know about them. Maybe this whole time I thought I was playing this big game and I was kind of this moderate Re publican, and they were way more conser vative than I realized and I was just kind of filling in the blanks in my head.

One of the things I discovered in those conversations was a lot of them did have a much deeper well of hatred for the left and for Obama in particular. I thought this was maybe an interesting insight: [Those]of my friends who went along with Trump to a per son hated Obama much more than the few of us never-Trumpers.

So I think the whole time I was like, I disagreed with Obama. Obamacare could have been better. Solyndra wasn’t that great, right? But me and you could have gone to the bar afterwards and have a beer. I didn’t hate him. I would love to go sit at a basketball game with Obama.

The people that I interviewed, what I dis covered was this whole kind of kayfabe, this fake show of performative fighting that I

thought I was doing; for a lot of them, it was more real than I realized.

PFEIFFER: And why did you think they hated Obama? [Laughter.]

MILLER: Why do you think?

PFEIFFER: Well, I think there’s a broader question about race in this. That is the an imating part of a lot of obviously how we get to this point, how the Republican Party gets here. But I don’t want to assume that’s the only or primary reason these people who work in politics feel that way.

MILLER: No, race obviously was a part of it. You hear the things that maybe don’t sound racist on the surface, but it’s like, “Obama was so condescending.”

It’s like, was he? I didn’t feel that way. More condescending than your average politician? I don’t think so. So there was clearly a racial [element]—with the base, there was clearly almost an explicit racial element. You look back at the Tea Party movement, and this no tion that that was about government spend ing I think is preposterous in retrospect. At the time, though, it seems like, okay, maybe it’s about government spending, but it’s clear that, had Obama’s first bill been, whatever, cap-and-trade, they would have pretended they were mad about that. It was this sort of racial and also cultural—which race is an element of, but also this sort of elite coastal versus “real America”—element. So I think that is part of the reason for sure.

Also for a lot of these folks, it is unfor tunately just this base annoyance with lib erals in their life that gets kind of projected onto everybody, not just Obama, not just Black Democrats, but like Elizabeth Warren, which could be a little bit of sexism. But Joe Biden now even gets it. Lindsey Graham fa mously in Jonathan Martin’s book said on January 6, “How could people get mad at Joe Biden? Maybe this will be a good mo ment for the country to come together.” Well, they found things to be mad at Joe Biden about. [Laughter.]

What kept coming up in the Caroline conversation that I got to put on the record, that really kind of—

PFEIFFER: Maybe just tell people a little bit about who Caroline is. It’s the framing part of the book, I think.

MILLER: Sure. Caroline Wren is a good friend of mine, and a really personal friend. You have DC friends—me and Dan are D.C. friends; we’ve never had dinner togeth er. [Laughter.] But Caroline is like a personal friend. We would talk about our life options or relationship troubles.

She was a very moderate Republican, worked with me on Jon Huntsman’s cam paign, worked for a lot of RINOs [Republi cans in Name Only]. I tell in the story about how she on her own flies to Germany to bring gifts to refugees. This is a person that is not a hateful person in their heart, at least in

my experience. And she gets sucked up into Trumpworld. It’s kind of by accident. She’s the finance director for the RNC conven tion. You don’t think Trump’s going to win; Trump wins the convention and then you get in this bunker mode. She becomes very defensive of him and of his people.

Then you start to enjoy the access and the star power of it. All the sudden you’re hang ing out with the family, you’re backstage or on Trump Force One. This all makes me sick, but I can understand how somebody might get sucked up in this. Eventually she just kind of gets caught up in the accoutrements of be ing around the president, being in the inside circle. She ends up, as you said, on January 6, having her name on the permit for the mall, because she was doing advance or whatever, setting up the chairs for the VIPs.

So we went and had drinks in Santa Mon ica for like six or seven hours. I was like, “I didn’t understand this. How did we grow so far apart? I thought we were the same. We were both moderate Republicans. How can you be fully Trump cult and me be a nev er-Trumper?” There are a lot of revelations in that conversation, because we had so many tequilas.

PFEIFFER: I was hungover just reading that. [Laughter.]

MILLER: But the one thing that really stuck out to me, that just kind of stopped me short is, we kept going back and forth on all the

various issues and why are you mad at this and what do you think about this and that?

Finally, I get to: “I just don’t get it. Is there something about him you really, really like, or is all of it just you’ve come to hate all of the people that hate Trump?”

She thinks about it for a second and then says, “I really think it’s the latter.” She’s like, “I’m just so sick of these liberals and their Priuses with their coexist stickers drinking their coffee coladas and wagging their finger at me and making me drink out of my pa per straw.” I’m like, I hate paper straws too, but what does that have to do with Donald Trump? Nothing.

That was the most stark example of a con versation that I had 20 of when writing this book. Every normal Republican that I talked to, the conversation would go and go and eventually you get to a point where you get under a layer and they’d have this grievance. Sometimes it’d be about their kid’s school and the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] packets, and sometimes it’d be about the media’s being mean to them. Sometimes it would be that their friend won’t talk to them anymore because [they say] they’re racist because they work for Donald Trump. And whatever it is, these various grievances and hatreds of the left ended up allowing them to rationalize what they did.

PFEIFFER: Try to unpack that a second. Is that because they think he will fight harder against these forces, or he is a more effective fighter or he’s tougher than the other Repub licans, or he just can be sort of their a--hole aide in public.

MILLER: For some, it’s a--hole aide. Rich Lowry said this; Lowry is the head of the Na tional Review, which is supposed to be like the erudite journal of conservative thought.

PFEIFFER: Now it’s Polysyllabic Federalist

MILLER: Yeah, exactly. [Laughter.]

He wrote an article like two weeks before the election this year. It’s like “Donald Trump is a middle finger to all the people that you hate in America.” I’m just like, “Really, this is why you’re voting for Donald?” It just seems so childish. And he’s supposed to be the ed itor of the [journal founded by] William F. Buckley, you know, the inheritor of conser vative thought.

But they’re just varying copycats of that. For some people then I think it was, like Caroline, it just tickled something inside them. It’s like emotion, they are mad at the

PHOTO BY SARAH GONZALEZ/SMGFOTO

Dan Pfeiffer (left) interviews Tim Miller at The Commonwealth Club.

left or the changes in the country. I think for people out in America, for some of them, it’s like they’re mad about the changing racial dy namics, and when they watch their movies, the white people aren’t the heroes anymore, like things that are as simple as that.

Then for a lot of my friends that I focused on in the book, I really think for them it was more of a rationalization. One guy stands out to me. He says to me something like, “You know, I hate him. And there’s not much I like about him. But the way I’m treated”—he was a white guy, obviously—“the way I’m treated by woke culture, it just has left me no option but just to really grab onto the one or two things I really agree with him on and focus on that while I continue along.”

PFEIFFER: The they made me do it strategy. MILLER: Yeah, they made me do it strategy. I was just like, you just admitted that to me on the telephone and I know we’re off the record, but I’m going to know who you are. [Laughter.] But I think the interesting thing is that in that culture, which I’m not in any more, I just think that that’s kind of conver sation, right? Like at the bar around the other Republican political types who know better, who know about Donald Trump, who know how dangerous he is, that’s how they make themselves feel better.

PFEIFFER: In your political journey, work ing for McCain, working for Huntsman, trying to help Romney beat Obama, Jeb Bush—let’s go before Jeb Bush, that’s when you were dealing with Trump. But were there some moments on that journey where you saw the party turning in ways that were alarming, whether it’s stuff in the Tea Party or elsewhere, there were sort of warning signs to you, even if it didn’t mean that Donald Trump [would] be president one day, at least a dangerous undercurrent within the party that made you uncomfortable?

MILLER: Yeah. This book starts in Iowa with Sarah Palin with McCain. And I’m sure this stuff goes back further than that. [If someone wanted to] write a history book, you can go back to Goldwater, whatever. But I was in Iowa in ’07, I guess, in this primary. And McCain at that time is working with Ted Kennedy on an immigration reform bill, which shows that as bad as the party has always seen, like there was some good stuff happening back then. There has been some change.

So he’s doing that. And every question at the town hall we’re getting is about immigra tion, amnesty, and it’s like weird conspiracy theory about the NAFTA super highway.

And they’re all mad at him. They all hate him. McCain’s poll numbers tank and I’m off the campaign after he has to fire everybody. He can’t afford a staff.

Then he has this rebound, mostly because none of the other candidates are very good. During his rebound, he shifts his immigra tion rhetoric a little bit and McCain-Kenne dy dies. He doesn’t become Donald Trump, but he starts to sort of do the thing like, “Well, we can’t do any immigration reform until we have a wall.” He does that; later goes on to do the “[complete] the danged fence” ad. And then in the general [election], Palin happens, and the crowds at the Palin event were like that McCain caucus crowd but like on steroids. It’s all the deplorables 10 years later.

At the [Palin rallies], they’re feral. The McCain rallies are like very staid. The Palin rallies are people shouting like how Obama is a Muslim. So obviously in ’08 it was all there, which is like why I felt I had to do the mea culpa part, because I saw it. I knew it. And I slowly get sucked back in because Jon Huntsman’s a moderate. And then, you know, you’re on the career ladder. So I think it was super-clear in ’08.

PHOTO BY SARAH GONZALEZ/SMGFOTO

I think frankly, Trump probably could have won the 2012 primary and probably frankly could win the 2008 primary; or Palin could have won the 2012 primary; and the inevitable takeover of the populist wing of the party, the crazy wing, was only delayed four years because there were no good vessels for it. You know, these opponents like Rick Santorum—

PFEIFFER: —and Newt Gingrich

MILLER: —and Newt Gingrich.

PFEIFFER: Who almost beat him, right?

MILLER: Yeah. Who still almost beat them despite the fact they are horrible candi dates and has-beens and were really bad at channeling the populist rage that Palin and Trump were so good at channeling. So yeah, I think it was super-clear from ’08.

PFEIFFER: Do you think there were things Republican Party leaders could have done? Like you write in the book about how they begin this dance, particularly after—to give a little history here, Bush wins in ’04. Two well-known political reporters wrote a book called The Emerging Republican Majority

MILLER: Yeah.

PFEIFFER: The view was Democrats would never gain power again. Republicans were making gains with Latino voters and Black voters are moving to their camp, and Demo crats were screwed.

Then all of a sudden, George Bush—be tween Iraq [and] Katrina—goes in the toi let, Democrats win the House and Senate. Obama wins by a margin no one ever possi bly expected, and no one thought someone who looked [like him] or was named Barack Hussein Obama could get elected. And then the [Republican] Party is trying to scratch its way back to relevance.

MILLER: Right.

PFEIFFER: As you write in the book, they get in bed with the Tea Party far right ele ments. Was there a point, do you think, where someone in the party could have said—like McCain did in his rally famous ly in ’08 to the woman who called Obama Muslim—could have said no, and could have maybe put a stop to this, or were we inevitably on this path?

MILLER: I think we are inevitably on this path. It could have been healthier. So the Tim Miller autopsy, compassionate conserva tism yay, climate change, gay marriage, let’s be nice to immigrants party was never happen ing, okay? That was never going to happen. That was just wishcasting by us in 2012.

We’re all so myopic in America, but if you look globally, every conservative party in the world right now in first world countries is a nationalist, populist, conservative party. These trends are not unique to us.

I’m interested in the counterfactual. This is like the “real Marxism has never been tried” [claim]. Good faith, conservative populism has never been tried.

I’m intrigued by—let’s say instead of try ing to force feed the base, we’ll be nicer to im migrants and gays, we would have said Bush screwed up with Iraq; we’re going to stop with the globalism, and stop with the ad venturous wars and we’re going to stop with the trade that’s sending your jobs to China or whatever; and we’re going to do more of a kind of protectionist, nationalist, genuine policy shift in the party that tries to meet some of these voters’ grievances—the legit imate grievances. Some of their grievances, as we’ve talked about, are based on race and bigotry. Some of them are legitimate, like their communities have been hollowed out, that it was the people that got sent to the war were not people from my neighborhood. So they have reason to be upset.

Could that have happened? Could there have been a Republican pivot, more like a re sponsible party? It wouldn’t have appealed to Tim Miller. But could that party [have come about]? I don’t know. There’s no responsible populist GOP right now.

Let’s say that, hypothetically, had the [au

“[National Review editor] Rich Lowry . . . wrote an article; it’s like ‘Donald Trump is a middle finger to all the people you hate in America.’ Like, really?, This is why you’re voting for Donald [Trump]?”

thor and U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio] J.D. Vance, before he turned into a conspiracy theorist freak, the J.D. Vance who wrote the book [Hillbilly Elegy], and then said, “Okay, I’m going to just offer these more protection ist, nationalist policy agenda items.” Could that person have offered a Republican Party that looks more like—this is a bad analogy this week—like Boris Johnson has? Maybe; I don’t know. That would have been better than what we have, where our democracy is in threat right now.

I still would have left the party probably over that. But I think that that’s an interest ing counterfactual.

PFEIFFER: It’s interesting to think about that, because probably the reason that did not happen is not just the magic of Donald Trump; it’s also that it’s the incredible and probably irreconcilable tension between, even to this day, the sort of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan economic agenda and the eco nomic beliefs of the base. You have this work ing class base that, generally, even though as long as they don’t know it’s from Barack Obama, they want government health care; they want Social Security; they want Medi care; they don’t think it’s great that Amazon is paying zero dollars in taxes.

That sort of was one of Steve Bannon’s ideas after 2012, we can’t talk about that stuff. So we’ve got to go tickle the culture wars sides of their brain. You have to sort of reshape the GOP electorate to get there MILLER: They just had to dump the Ryan agenda. Someone could have instead of Donald Trump could’ve come into the 2016

primary and said, “I’m going to try to run a quixotic campaign where we dump the Paul Ryan trickle down agenda,” and that person might have won.

PFEIFFER: Which Trump did sort of do. MILLER: Yeah, but he also added all the cruelty and the bigotry and the freak show and the conspiracy. Okay, so can you decou ple those two things, is the question.

I kind of think [you could] now. In my original joke about Marxism, the reason why conservative populism in genuine pol icy terms can’t really work is because you’re always going to get beaten by somebody that can go onto Fox and go into cable and offer something that’s more red meat, that tickles people’s grievances at a deeper level. There’s no infrastructure for this kind of thing. The Fox suits are not interested in a genuine pop ulist like an anti-Wall Street party. That’s not what they’re interested in. They’re happy with the tax cut agenda, and like throw in some red meat about the Ground Zero mosque or the caravan or whatever to people. So I think the conservative media complex probably makes it impossible.

PFEIFFER: One thing you and I certainly had in common was we thought there was very little chance Donald Trump would win the election.

MILLER: That was a miss. [Laughter.]

PFEIFFER: Yeah, we were wrong about that. Not to do hypotheticals, but I was wrong about who was going to win the presidency, but I was sure Donald Trump was going to win the primary. Working for Obama, I got to see how these people reacted to Obama. I

got to sit in a room where a Republican con gressman called [Obama] “boy”— you sort of know what is happening there.

MILLER: Is that congressman in leadership now? [Laughter.]

PFEIFFER: That congressman is not in Congress right now—because he got beat by someone more conservative, more racist, someone who would say that in public. His problem is he kept his racism in the privacy of a conference room.

But I’ve been operating under the theory that the Republican Party was going to burn itself out and would theoretically reform or change after losing ’08, ’12 and ’16. What did you think would happen if Trump, as you and I had both thought, had lost in ’16?

MILLER: I don’t think it would have changed much, to be honest, because this is a bottom-up thing. I just thought Trump was too boobish to win the primary in 2016. So I was wrong about that.

But I did [think] if it isn’t going to be Jeb, it’s going to be a crazy person. I thought it was more likely to be Cruz than Trump, but I thought that it would be one of those two.

The night I realized it was going to be Trump was after one of the debates and I met Reince Priebus, who [was] the RNC chair, my former boss, in a bar after the debate. I was like, “You need to quit your job. Trump’s about to win. You should just get out before it gets crazy for you.”

He promised me, he said, “Don’t worry, we need to have a good person in the room. And if things get out of hand, I’ll quit. I promise you.” He ended up getting fired by tweet.

“I just don’t get it. Is there something about him you really, really like, or is it you’ve come to hate all of the people that hate Trump?”

On the Road to Freedom

Discussion Leader

Robert Greene

Robert Greene is the CEO/ Principal of Cedar & Bur well Strategic Consulting, specializing in the application of DEIBA (Di versity, Equity, Inclusivity, Belonging, and Accessibility) technologies in broad-scale organizational development consulting. Prior to Cedar & Burwell, Robert served as a teacher and ad ministrator in educational organizations, de partment leader in for-profit organizations, and trustee and director for non- profit and social entrepreneurship agencies. He brings insightful thinking, writing, and consulting to issues ranging from organizational devel opment and leadership design; diversity and inclusion leadership and management strate gies; wealth and social class disparities; the impact of identity differences in employee culture; and bias awareness and bias resis tance training.

He’s partnered with an extensive and varied list of leaders and organizations including Berkeley Law School; BlackRock; Capital Group; The John D. and Catherine T. MacAr thur Foundation; Harvard-Westlake School; Marin Country Day School (CA); Media Rights Capital Studios; Occidental College; Phillips Academy Andover; St. Mary’s Col lege; SFFilm; and YPO among many others.

Robert earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown (econ/political science) and Harvard (administration, planning, and social policy) respectively.

JACKSON

Sunday, March 19

Independent arrivals in Jackson. Trans fer to the Westin Jackson. Afternoon visit to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. This museum provides an honest and painful account of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, be ginning with the back story to the civil rights period – the European slave trade. Evening welcome reception and dinner at the hotel. R,D

JACKSON

Monday, March 20 O ur morning begins at the Medgar Evers Home Museum, where Evers lived and was later assassinated in 1963. Walk past the home, which has been restored to the way it looked in 1963. Continue to Malaco Records, an American independent record la bel based in Jackson, that has been the home of various major blues and gos pel acts. Continue to COFO’s Civil Rights Education Center and meet with Dr. Robert Luckett, Director of the Margaret Walker Center. We also meet with Hezekiah Watkins, a civil rights activist from Mississippi who became the youngest Freedom Rider nearly 60 years ago.

After lunch drive to the former Greyhound bus station, a prominent site from the 1961 Freedom Rides. Contin ue to Farish Street, a thriving center of African-American life in the Jim Crow era and pass by the Collins Funeral Home, where a throng of 4,000 mourn ers marched after the death of Medgar Evers.

Stop by the Big Apple Inn, where we will meet with the owner, Geno Lee, whose unique delicacy, Pig’s Ear Sand wich, has attracted the likes of BB King and even President Obama.

Dinner tonight at Johnny T’s and after enjoy a private performance by a local Blues musician. B,L,D

LITTLE ROCK

Tuesday, March 21

Depart Jackson today for Little Rock, stopping by the BB King Museum.

Drive to Greenwood and the Museum of the Mississippi Delta where we have an authentic delicious barbeque lunch prepared by Mary Hoover, who catered for the movie “The Help.” Continue to Baptist Town with Sylves ter Hoover who shows you their store and the Back in the Day Museum. Tour the community museum which explores the history of African-Amer ican culture in the Delta. Continue on to the nearby town of Money to see the remains of the Bryant’s Grocery, the site associated with the murder of black teenager Emmett Till.

End the day in Sumner at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and meet with Benjamin Saulsberry where we will learn of the apology resolution written by the community. Enjoy din ner at Sumner’s Grille before continu ing on to Little Rock and the Burgundy Hotel. B,L,D

MEMPHIS

Wednesday, March 22 Today begins with a visit to Little Rock High School, a national emblem of the often violent struggle over school de segregation. The crisis here forced the nation to enforce African-American civil rights in the face of massive south ern defiance during the years following the Brown decision, a major triumph of the movement. Here we will have the opportunity to meet with Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine.

Continue on to the William J. Clin ton Presidential Center housed in a gleaming modern space overlooking the Arkansas River.

Continue on to Memphis and check-in to the hotel before dinner at a local res taurant. B,L,D

MEMPHIS

Thursday, March 23

Begin the morning at the Lorraine Mo tel, now the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Martin Luther King, Jr. stayed at the motel on April 4, 1968, the day of his assassination. Enjoy lunch at The Four Way, one of the oldest soul food restaurants in Memphis whose regulars included Martin Luther King Jr, Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin. This afternoon, we will focus on Memphis’ music history with a visit to the Stax Museum of American Soul, located in Soulsville. End the day with a visit the Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum, where dark cellars, hidden passageways and trap doors were used by runaway slaves attempting to flee north to freedom. Dinner is at your lei sure this evening. B,L

BIRMINGHAM

Friday, March 24

This morning, travel to Birmingham and stop at the 16th Street Baptist Church where a bomb killed four young girls as they prepared to sing in their choir on September 15, 1963. We have asked Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, who was 14 and inside the church when the bomb exploded, to join us on our visit. Across the street is the historic Kelly Ingram Park, site of civil rights rallies, dem onstrations and confrontations in the 1960s and now sculptures provide visual reminders of the past. We have invited Rev. McKinstry to join us for lunch.

After lunch, visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, an interactive museum that tells the story of the Civil Rights Movement. The institute is also home to an expansive archive of nearly 500 recorded oral histories relevant to the period.

Check into the Redmont Hotel

Dinner at leisure. B,L MONTGOMERY

Saturday, March 25 Drive to Selma and stop at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of Malcolm X’s ad dress in support of voting rights. Three marches from Selma to Montgomery began here and it served as the tem porary headquarters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Continue to the Selma Interpretive Center for a conversation with Foot Soldier, Annie Pearl Avery whose civil rights work spans decades. Walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where we will walk in memory of those who were beaten while seeking the right to vote.

Enjoy lunch in Selma at the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Rec onciliation. The lunch will be based on MLK’s favorite food and prepared by Ms. Callie Greer who founded a nonprofit organization, Mothers Against Violence in Selma (MAVIS).

Continue on to Montgomery via the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail and check into the Renais sance Montgomery Hotel. Dinner this evening is at your leisure. B,L

MONTGOMERY

Sunday, March 26 Morning drive to the home of Richard and Vera Harris with their daughter, Dr. Valda Harris Montgomery. Located four doors down from MLK’s parson age, the house was a haven for freedom riders. Enjoy a short walking tour.

End the morning at the Legacy Mu seum: From Enslavement to Mass

What to Expect

Please note that our itinerary involves some time driving from city to city, as well as a fair amount of walking around the sites including climbing up and down stairs. Most days have an earlymorning start and include a full day’s schedule of activities, lectures and special events. Participants must be in good health and able to keep up with an active group. The temperatures in the region average in the 60s - 70s (°F) and can be slightly humid. This program will be covering topics that include violence, and that may be difficult for children. Lectures and discussions are geared to an adult audience. Therefore, we do not recommend this program for people under 16.

Incarceration. Focusing on the history of racial injustice, the museum is situated on the site where enslaved people were once warehoused.

Enjoy lunch at local restaurant before visit ing the deeply powerful National Memorial for Peace and Justice, created by the Equal Justice Initiative. End the day with a debrief led by staff members of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Enjoy a farewell dinner at the Central Res taurant. B,L,D

DEPART

Monday, March 27 Independent transfers to the airport for return flights home.B

Itinerary is subject to change

Edmund

On the Road to Freedom: Understanding the Civil Rights Movement

Traveler

Cardholder

completed form to: Commonwealth Club Travel, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 or fax to (415) 597-6729.

questions

to reserve by phone

(415) 597-6720.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

The Commonwealth Club (CWC) has contracted with Distant Horizons (DH) to organize this tour.

Reservations and Payments: A $1,000 per person deposit, will reserve a place for participants on this program. The balance of the trip is due 60 days prior to departure and must be paid by check.

Tour Price Includes: Accommodations in hotels as outlined in the itinerary based on double occupancy, prices listed are based on two persons sharing a twin room. Distant Horizons reserves the right to substitute hotels for those named in the brochure when necessary. Distant Horizons will do all possible for single participants to satisfy requests to share rooms. On oc casions when it is not possible, the single room supplement will apply. If Distant Horizons assigns you a roommate and your roommate cancels or changes their mind about sharing a room, you will be liable for the single room supplement. American breakfast (B), lunches (L) and dinners (D) are included as specified in the itinerary. Soft drink is included with lunch and one with dinner; welcome and farewell recep tions include beer and wine; educational program of discussions; entrance fees to monuments; bottled water kept on the tour vehicle; the services of a Distant Horizons tour manager; special activities as quoted in the itinerary; and gratuities to the local guides; tour manager, driver, and waitstaff for included meals.

Tour Price Does Not Include: Air service to Jackson and from Montgomery; meals

not specified in the itinerary; transfers to and from airports; chambermaid gratuities; alcoholic drinks at included meals except for welcome and farewell receptions; rinks other than soft drinks at meals; porterage; personal items such as laundry; email; fax or telephone calls; liquor; room service; independent and private transfers; luggage charges and private trip insurance.

Cancellation and Refund Policy: Notifi cation of cancellation must be received in writing. At the time we receive your written cancellation, the following penalties will apply:

• 120 days or more before departure: no penalty

• 119-90 days before departure: $500 of the $1,000 deposit

• 89-61 days before departure: $1000 deposit

• 60 days before departure: No refund

The tour can also be cancelled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor DH accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in conjunction with the tour.

Trip Cancellation and Interruption

Insurance: We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered unforeseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing cover age will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation.

Medical Information: Participation in this program requires that you be in good health. It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary

restrictions make them known to us well before departure. Dietary restrictions must be known well in advance as we may not be able to accommodate all requests and restrictions.

COVID-19: We understand that travel ers have concerns about booking trips due to COVID-19. The Commonwealth Club has instituted a vaccine requirement for their departures. Guests will be required to show proof of vaccination. During the trip, we will follow the recommended precautions from the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), state and local agencies at the time of travel. Our aim is to protect our travelers, guest speakers, local staff and communities we visit.

Itinerary Changes & Trip Delay: This itinerary is based on information available at the time of printing (July 2022) and is subject to change. We reserve the right to change a program’s dates, staff, itineraries, or accommodations as conditions warrant. If a trip must be delayed, or the itinerary changed, due to bad weather, road condi tions, transportation delays, airline sched ules, government intervention, sickness or other contingency for which CWC or DH or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes are not included. The minimum group size of this departure is 15 paying participants. Should the num ber of guests drop below 15 a small-group surcharge will be proposed to guests.

Limitations of Liability: CWC and DH its Owners, Agents, and Employees act only as the agent for any transportation carrier, hotel, ground operator, or other suppliers of services connected with this

program (“other providers”), and the other providers are solely responsible and liable for providing their respective services. CWC and DH shall not be held liable for (A) any damage to, or loss of, property or injury to, or death of, persons occasioned directly or indirectly by an act or omission of any other provider, including but not limited to any defect in any aircraft, or vehicle operated or provided by such other provider, and (B) any loss or damage due to delay, cancellation, or disruption in any manner caused by the laws, regulations, acts or failures to act, demands, orders, or interpositions of any government or any subdivision or agent thereof, or by acts of God, strikes, fire, flood, war, rebellion, ter rorism, insurrection, sickness, quarantine, pandemics, epidemics, theft, or any other cause(s) beyond their control. The partici pant waives any claim against CWC/DH for any such loss, damage, injury, or death. By registering for the trip, the participant certifies that he/she does not have any men tal, physical, or other condition or disability that would create a hazard for him/herself or other participants. CWC/DH shall not be liable for any air carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a non refundable ticket to or from the departure city. Baggage and personal effects are at all times the sole responsibility of the traveler. Reasonable changes in the itinerary may be made where deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the passengers.

SINCE DARWIN, EVOLUTIONARY

biology has been “all about the boys,” with the males of the species being presented as drivers of change and females as passive figures, zoologist Lucy Cooke argues. Cooke instead seeks to humorously reinvent the narrative—and show just how fierce, dangerous and hilarious the queens of the animal kingdom can be. From the June 21, 2022, program “Lucy Cooke: The Queens of the Animal Kingdom.”

LUCY COOKE, Zoologist; Author, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

It’s great to be speaking here in San Francisco, because last time I was [at the Club], I was down in Silicon Valley. So it’s fantastic to be in this fabulous building to talk to you about how female animals have been marginalized and misunderstood by the scientific patriarchy.

I’ll kick off with a flavor of the kind of marginalized behavior that I’m talking about with my tutor from Oxford, Richard Dawkins. He was a very terrifying man to write an essay for, I can tell you. He was the author of the The Selfish Gene, and the Selfish Gene had this to say about females— that “the female is exploited, and the fundamental evolutionary basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperms. Female exploitation begins here.” [That’s] a pretty depressing statement to receive,

as an egg-making student of evolution, but you can’t blame Dawkins for this sentiment, because it goes further back all the way to my scientific hero, Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin was an incredible scientist. His theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the greatest theories in the whole of science. But he was also a man of his time, so when he came to define the sexes, he branded the female of the species in the shape of a Victorian housewife, because that was what was appropriate for the time. And because Darwin said it, all the scientists that followed in his wake suffered from a chronic case of confirmation bias and either just ignored things that didn’t fit in with the paradigm that he’d set up, or they just didn’t study females at all.

He outlined his idea of the sexes in his second great theoretical

PHOTO BY PHOTO RABE / PIXABAY

LUCY COOKE THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

masterpiece, which was published in 1871, which is The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. He said that “The males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Hence it is the males that fight together and sedulously display their charms before the females. The female on the other hand with the rarest of exceptions, is less eager than the male she generally requires to be courted. She is coy.” Now try telling a

We’ll start with the lioness. The lioness is really special to me, because it was the first inkling that I had that females didn’t behave in the way that I’d been taught at university. They weren’t submissive, coy and chaste, as Darwin had outlined.

About 15 years ago, I was in the Serengeti and I was making a series for the BBC about animal communication. We were basically trying to have a conversation with a lion,

There was this sort of [low-energy roar] sound coming out of a loudspeaker; I was like, this is never going to work, but it did. Sure enough, we [played our] sound, and then in the distance [we heard a lion’s roar] and then got closer and we play our roar. We played audio ping pong with this lion for about 5 minutes until out of the gloom, padded not one but three lions, two males and a female.

female spotted hyena that she needs to be coy and submissive, and she’ll laugh in your face after she’s bitten it off.

We now know that females are just as competitive, aggressive, dominant, promiscuous, dynamic and varied as males. It’s just for centuries we either weren’t looking or didn’t want to see it. But thankfully things are starting to change. In the last few decades, a revolution has been brewing, which is redefining not just the female of the species, but the very forces that shape evolution.

HEAR ME ROAR

I’m going to introduce you to some of the females that are part of that revolution.

which is actually not that difficult. All you need is a loud speaker with a lion’s roar. We had a recording of a lion’s roar, and I was with Dr. [Ludwig] Siefert, who was a German expert in lion communication. We played the sound of a lion’s roar out of a little portable speaker.

First of all, the sound of a lion’s roar is nothing like the MGM sound that you’re familiar with. It’s not a kind of majestic roar; it actually sounds more like a sort of [a low-energy roar], kind of almost as if Boris Johnson was looking for cheese at midnight; that kind of sound. [Laughter.] It doesn’t sound like the sound of a lion’s roar. So the whole thing seemed completely crazy to me.

And the males, as soon as they came across nothing, they didn’t find anything that looked or smelt like a male lion, they just disappeared. But the female lion pinned us to the spot and lay in front of the jeep, her legs akimbo, and wouldn’t move for 2 hours. We were stuck there.

I said to Dr. Siefert, “What’s going on?”

And he goes, “Ah, she wants to mate with us.”

I was like, “Yeah, but isn’t she like mating with one of those males that she was with?”

He’s like, “Oh, ja, ja, ja, ja, , but the female lioness, she’s amazingly promiscuous. She’ll mate over a hundred times in a matter of days with multiple males during estrous.”

“The males were infanticidal because if a new male comes into a territory, then the females nursing [their] babies are not going to be receptive.”

Whoa, that wasn’t what I was taught. That’s news to me. I was sort of quietly thrilled and curious about this incredibly licentious nature of the lioness.

Well, we now know why the lioness behaves in such a promiscuous way, thanks to Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who I think might be listening [to this Club program] online. Sarah is really a trailblazer in challenging these stereotypes. She’s the first person to look at

they’re nursing the babies, they’re not going to be receptive to having babies with this new male. But if [the males] kill the babies, then she’ll be forced into estrus and she’ll be receptive. So if the females have this counter strategy by mating with all the males in the area, then that prevents them killing the babies, because the males, all they have to remember is if they’ve recently had sex with a female then not to kill the babies.

all sorts of bad names for such behavior. But as Sarah says, actually these females are just being seriously maternal. They’re actually being good moms, and that’s why they’re behaving in that way.

VULTURE PIE AND FEMINIST DARWINISTS

So when I came to start researching this book, Sarah was top of my list of people that I wanted to get in touch with. I wrote

this conundrum of female sexual strategy.

Sarah was studying at Harvard and she went into the field to study langurs to find out about infanticide, because the males are infanticidal, and they sometimes kill females’ babies. But what she also noticed was that the females were very actively soliciting sex from males outside of the group. She was really the first scientist to not ignore this behavior that didn’t fit the paradigm but to go, “Well, this is interesting, now why is this happening?” She figured out that it was actually connected with infanticide. She worked out that basically the males are infanticidal because if a new male comes into a territory, then the females, if they’ve got babies already and

So this theory has now been applied to over 50 species, including lions. It’s the same story with lions. Basically the females are mating with multiple males to protect their offspring. They’re being good moms. In some cases they have an awful lot of sex in order to protect their offspring. We know that an ovulating chimp female might solicit sex with every male in her community and have sex 30 to 50 times a day. It sounds positively exhausting, doesn’t it? Barbary cat females are equally lustful, with one female recorded having sex at least once every 17 minutes with every sexually mature male in the group, of which they were 11. So what’s really interesting is in human society, females would be given

to her; she actually lives here in California. She very generously responded and said, “Yeah, come visit me; I’ve got a walnut farm and you can come and visit me at the farm.” I was kind of nervous, because I had been taught by Richard Dawkins, who’s a scary character. Here was a woman who’s got an equal canon of work —she’s written at least three brilliant books.

I was kind of nervous about going there, but when I got there, I couldn’t have been made more welcome, because Sarah actually baked me a pie. She listened to my previous book the night before on audiobook and knew that I love vultures, and so she baked me a vulture pie. There were no vultures in the pie;

“Basically, the females are mating with multiple males to protect their offspring. These females are just being seriously maternal.”

it was a chicken pie. It was delicious. But she put vultures on the top because she knew I loved vultures, which was incredibly sweet. She has been incredibly welcoming and a great mentor throughout the whole of this project.

What was even more amazing than her pie were her house guests, because she had staying with her at the time Mary Jane WestEberhard and Jeanne Altmann. Together these women have redefined what it means to be female. They have fought the scientific patriarchy with fierce data and logic. We owe them a huge amount. It was extraordinary to get to meet them. I like to think of them as the rabble-rousing matriarchs of modern Darwinism. The fourth member of the crew is Patricia Adair Gowaty. These women call themselves feminist Darwinists; they’re not saying that Darwin was all wrong by any means, it’s just that he was looking at the world through a Victorian pinhole camera. Thanks to their work and the scientists that they’ve inspired, we’re now getting the full Technicolor version of life. It’s so much richer and more interesting for it.

But of course tearing down paradigms doesn’t come easy and often requires a fight. Patty in particular has, despite how sweet she looks and sounds, she’s had to do quite a lot of fighting. A good example is one of her early studies, which was on songbirds. So songbirds we think of as being the sort of very paragon of monogamy. You see the male songbird, and he sings his heart out and attracts a female. Then together they’ll build a nest and raise the chicks together. But Patty was like, “I wonder whether it’s all so sweet at home as it really seems.” So what she did was something totally ingenious, which was that she co-opted technology that had been developed for forensics, DNA fingerprinting, and was the first person to use that to paternity test eggs. She took a clutch of eggs and she checked to see whether they all had the same father, and they didn’t.

Her subject was the Eastern Bluebird, which is famous from “Zip-A-Dee-DooDah” and Disney films and is about as allAmerican as apple pie. Patty was basically calling her a Jezebel, which was never going to go down well, but even she was shocked

at how much resistance there was by the ornithological establishment to her data.

When she presented at an ornithological conference in the early 1980s with her data on the paternity, there was just outrage. She was told by a very famous male ornithologist that the only way that this could be possible was if the females had been raped, that’s the only answer for this. She’s like, “Well, it’s just ridiculous, because songbirds are about the only things that don’t need a MeToo movement, because it’s impossible.

had agency in this and they weren’t being victims.

We now know that there’s a huge difference between social and sexual monogamy. Songbirds do social monogamy very well. Sexual monogamy less so. In fact, there are only 7 percent of species of birds that are actually monogamous, and that figure may even be lower by now. Even swans are unfaithful [laughter], but this discovery sparked what was being called a polyandry revolution. We now understand that animals

It’s impossible for them to be raped, you know?” So basically songbirds, they have a cloaca. The male doesn’t have a penis to mate with the female, to fertilize her, so he’s got to balance on her back and they’ve got to line up their cloaca. So if the female is not into it at any stage, she can just fly off, you know? So the idea that she was being sexually coerced was completely ludicrous, yet that was the line that was taken.

It actually took other scientists—Bridget Stutchbury was one, putting radio trackers on female birds and tracking their movements and finding that they were actively leaving their territory and soliciting sex with other males in order to establish that the females

as diverse as lions and lizards and lobsters— females all have a strategy of mating with multiple males. To Patricia Gowaty, it’s really obvious: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you mate with multiple males you have more chance of finding genetic compatibility, and basically mating with multiple males means healthier offspring. At the end of the day, females are just as sexually strategic as males.

FIGHTING WORDS

But what about another one of those myths, which is that the males are the aggressive ones; they’re competitive, aggressive; and females are a passive and are not aggressive

“There’s a huge difference between social and sexual monogamy. Songbirds do social monogamy very well. Sexual monogamy less so.”

and not competitive. Well, females were branded basically by Darwin as having a maternal instinct; it was thought that females were good mothers. But as such, we had natural maternal instincts, and so we were all basically the same and we had no competitive edge. Well, that’s also not true. I’d like to introduce you tonight to the most murderous mammal in the animal kingdom—so, the mammal that’s most likely to kill a member of its own species . . . is the meerkat. You’re probably familiar with

desert, eviction is tantamount to a death sentence. But the females are allowed back on the condition that they will witness their [baby’s] murder themselves. That enables the dominant female to put all of her energy into making more pups and not have to spend energy on lactation herself.

So you know that’s pretty brutal, and that’s how the meerkat has become the most murderous mammal on the planet. A survey of a thousand mammals found that a meerkat was the most murderous, even more so than

distended abdomen, these are really taking this idea of cooperation to the max. You can just make out the head of the queen and her thorax and her legs; but her entire abdomen has swelled in order to just lay eggs basically, so she can lay over 20,000 eggs a day and is capable of producing, in theory, 146 million termites in her lifetime. They can live for 20 years, and they lay an egg every couple of seconds. But in order to do that, that’s all she can do, so she is serviced by an army of helpers who will feed her and clean her and look after the babies. She is the most reproductively successful animal on the planet. Yet in order to achieve this her abdomen swells over a thousand times, allowing her to spend all of that energy on laying eggs.

This extreme brand of cooperative breeding involving a clear division of labor between the queen and the workers is known as eusociality. It may seem comforting to think that just happens in insects, there’s nothing like that in mammals, we’ve got nothing so sort-of crazy sci fi going on among mammals. But we do, actually. It turns out there is a eusocial mammal out there, and it’s the naked mole rat. I happen to think that naked mole rats are incredibly cute—I may be alone in thinking that—but they are fantastically weird animals. They regularly top the uglyanimal charts; . . . they’re fantastically weird animals.

the meerkat from cute TV shows. They’re incredibly cute and funny creatures. But the fact of the matter is that every meerkat has a one-in-five chance of being killed by another meerkat, most probably its own mother or sister. Meerkat society is tense and homicidal, and it’s predicated on ruthless competition between females who will readily kill and eat each other’s pups.

This is kept in check by a dominant female who’s the dominant member of the community. Meerkats live in extended family groups, and any female that dares to get pregnant by a roving male, [the dominant female will] kill their babies and evict them from the clan. Obviously in the Kalahari

humans, and it’s the females that are the most aggressive.

I mean, it’s not exactly “Meerkat Manor.” It has always surprised me that meerkats have become such cozy, cute TV fodder when their society is so brutal. They are described scientifically as being cooperative, which has also struck me as somewhat ironic. It doesn’t seem much like cooperation to me. It’s more like reproductive despotism, but it’s definitely very competitive and aggressive.

SOCIAL BUTTERFLIES

Now, of course, the queens of the cooperative lifestyle are the social insects. [If you look at a pregnant] termite queen and her gargantuan

I love strange, weird animals, and I’ve wanted to see them all my life. [Naked mole rats] live in vast underground networks in very hostile places in Kenya and East Africa, under baked earth. [They are] incredibly hard to see, because they don’t pop up very often because they get burned to a crisp.

The first time I met them wasn’t in East Africa. It was in an incredibly hot cupboard in East London where [evolutionary ecologist] Chris Faulkes has been studying them. He’s created a facsimile of their underground world in this cupboard using a load of Tupperware and plastic tubing. It’s a fantastically Heath Robinson affair. But it does mean that he’s able to observe their extraordinary lifestyle.

They live in colonies up to 300, and there’s

“Every meerkat has a one-in-five chance of being killed by another meerkat, most probably its own mother or sister. Meerkat society is tense and homicidal.”

one queen who’s the only breeding female, and she has one or two mates. Outside of those breeding individuals—the Queen and her mates—none of the other members of the colony will breed because they can’t, because they haven’t gone through puberty. So she actually suppresses their reproduction and they don’t go through puberty.

Chris has been trying to work out why and how that is. He thinks that the way that she achieves it is by basically being a royal bully. They are extraordinary creatures [that exhibit] dominance behavior, [such as] clambering over the top [of one another in their tunnels]. She basically goes round physically stating her dominance by clambering over individuals, shoving them, biting them. I mean, it suddenly all makes the British royal family seem remarkably benign. [Laughter.]

But that’s what happens to the naked mole rat queen. She’s not like the termite who lives in a royal chamber and is sort of endlessly groomed and cared for. She’s just goes round

a gnawing teeth of death” and the tubes get filled with blood until a female becomes a winner. She has everything to play for because the queen is able to have litters of 27 pups at a time. This is an extraordinary feat for a mammal. She doesn’t even have that many nipples, so she can have 27 pups at a time. One female was documented having 900 pups in 24 years, which is an extraordinary output for a female.

We think of male elephant seals and the idea is that males are much more variable and much more varied in their reproductive success, because you’ll have one male that would have a bunch of females that he’ll command and the other males won’t breed. So this difference in reproductive success drives evolution. The idea was that females didn’t have that kind of difference.

Well, take a red stag, for example. They’re really famous, for the males have got these huge horns and they’ll fight each other. [One researcher] told me that the most successful

They’re studied in Silicon Valley labs because they hold the secret to eternal youth. They can live nine times longer than is expected of a mammal their size. Their DNA doesn’t age like normal mammals. They’re immune to cancer. When you touch them, I mean, they are really soft. You wouldn’t expect it, but it’s because their skin is full of . . . this interstitial gloop that’s in super-expensive face creams—so that is the face of eternal youth. It’s not pretty, but there it is.

POD QUEEN

So you’ll be pleased to hear that female authority isn’t always so brutal. [Look at a] pod of orcas. Orcas similarly live in family groups, hugely social, highly intelligent. They’re basically souped-up dolphins; they’re the biggest member of the cetacean family. For a long time, it was thought that it was the males that were in charge. Of course, they’re bigger and the females are just the harem. But it turns out that it’s not only the females that are in charge, it’s actually the postmenopausal grannies that are in charge. The research that has revealed this happened just off the coast of Washington State; a group of orcas known as the “southern residents” have told us all about this.

It’s fascinating, because menopause is actually incredibly rare in the animal kingdom. Natural selection takes a pretty dim view of a loss of fertility. If the point of life is to reproduce, once you stop reproducing you die.

Even famously long-lived animals like Galapagos tortoises or even elephants will continue reproducing into their twilight years, which is particularly astonishing when you think an elephant has a pregnancy of 22 months and she’s still going through that ordeal in her sixties. But that is the case, right? It’s amazing.

bullying the whole time. Chris thinks that upsets the hormones and particular prolactin. It means that they never go through sexual maturity. All the while, she’s dominant and on the move and on her big royal bullying tour. Once she stops, if she becomes weak, then Chris told me all hell breaks loose and he [says], “It gets very Game of Thrones really quick,” because a bunch of females will suddenly mature. Then they will fight to the death for the queen spots, because there’s everything to fight for in that moment.

The point of life is to reproduce and they have this one opportunity. He said that, “It’s

red stag he’s ever documented only ever managed to sire 25 offspring in his lifetime, for all of that fighting. And here you have the naked mole rat queen and she’s doing 900. So the idea that females are less variable than males is simply not true.

Now the female [naked mole rat] can live for 20-odd years, and you probably think to yourself, well, that’s quite a long time for an animal that size. They’re about the size of a hamster [and] should really only live about three years. This is the extra added topping on this dystopia: the queen is apparently immune to aging. It’s just extraordinary.

So orcas are something of an anomaly. But it was amazing to discover that the orcas also do this, because humans had been thought of as being menopausal freaks, basically, for living beyond our reproductive fitness. But we now know we’re not alone. It’s not just orcas. There are actually four species of toothed whale that also go through menopause. What we now understand from studying the orcas, basically by stopping reproducing halfway through their life they stop competing with their daughters; and by investing instead in their existing offspring, their genetic legacy does much better in the end. . . .

Basically these old lady whales are the repositories for ecological wisdom that keep their hunting community alive.

Sustainable Development and the Power of Women

WANJIRA MATHAI

From the June 7, 2022, Climate One program “Wanjira Mathai on Sustainable Development and the Power of Women.”

WANJIRA MATHAI, Vice President and Regional Director for Africa, World Resources Institute

GREG DALTON, Founder and Host, Climate One

GREG DALTON: Africa is responsible for a tiny portion of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet its people are already suffering some of the world’s most dev astating climate impacts. As the Global North looks to reduce its addiction to fossil fuels, the minerals required to do so increasingly depend on exploiting natural resources in the Global South, exacerbating a cycle of extraction, environmental devastation, dislocation, and political and social instability. . . .

WANJIRA MATHAI: It makes me sad. It makes me mad ,because it is a great injustice. Just as you put it, really the most important question that we must address is that injustice.

DALTON: How do we do that, and what role can empowering women play in doing that?

MATHAI: You know, Greg, one of

the things that is truly important is to ac knowledge that injustice. The first thing is knowing that science is so clear now that the climate is changing, it’s changing because of what we are doing to it. The human impact on climate is now indisputable. Then the fact that actually with that climate change will come absolutely unbearable impact. Those impacts will hit hardest those who have done the least to cause this problem.

Now, if you look at a continent like Afri ca, where I live in Kenya, what that means for daily life is the disruption of farming, the disruption of [the] movement of goods and services, especially when we have too much water or too little water, which is heavy rains or no rains at all. We are largely a rain-fed agricultural economy. The GDPs of many parts of our world are driven by agriculture, rain-fed agriculture. So just imagine for a second the impact of not having rains at the right time at the right place. It really does wreak havoc on food security. That is funda mentally what we absolutely need to survive.

We haven’t even talked about the damage to livelihoods, businesses that are flooded out, businesses that rely on energy that is

coming from hydroelectric power; when wa ter levels are low you cannot run [them]. The entire livelihood and systems that we depend on, our entire life support systems, are built on a healthy climate and a healthy environ ment, and that’s at stake.

Women are at the heart of this transfor mation. Women drive agriculture on the continent. Women hold their communities together, their children together. We know from research that women spend close to 70 percent of their income on their families. DALTON: And impacts are disproportion ately landing on women who often fetch wa ter, often cook over dirty cookstoves. So how are the impacts disproportionately affecting women and what impacts are you already seeing personally?

MATHAI: Well, we have those impacts that are affecting society as a whole, impacts like infrastructure destroyed. So we cannot have movement of goods and services, which is about trade, which is of course about the livelihoods of people being able to run their businesses. We have issues of lack of water, which spells havoc in a drought situation, droughts becoming famines and people go

ing hungry. We have millions of people in the East African region at the moment hun gry because rains have failed for 3, 4 years in a row. So we have absolute disasters, and that is women and children most disproportion ately affected.

We do have an energy crisis. One of the things that is becoming abundantly clear now is that energy development and climate are inextricably linked. We cannot talk about climate change adaptation, the ability to bounce back from the worst of climate [dis ruption], if we do not deal with the ability for communities to lift themselves from pov erty. Because poverty is the greatest underly ing driver of vulnerability. That vulnerabili ty is what causes so much loss and damage when we have the impacts of climate change. So being able to build a level of prosperity is very much a part of building resilience. You cannot build resilience and you cannot build prosperity if you do not have energy. So en ergy becomes a really important part of the climate discussion.

DALTON: Right. In that transition we know that developing countries if they de velop in the fossil-intensive way that the in

PHOTO BY IMSOGABRIEL/PIXABAY

dustrialized North developed, that explodes carbon emis sions. How can that pros perity you’re talking about happen in a new cleaner way?

Is it with leapfrogging tech nology? It’s not by following the playbook of Europe and North America.

MATHAI: That’s true. But here’s the reality that Africa is responsible as you said in the beginning of the program for 4 percent of global emissions. Remember that 3 percent of those are in South Africa. So overall Africa outside of South Africa is responsible for just 1 percent of global emissions. We also have 600 million people who are cooking on open fires around the world. We have a majori ty of those here on the continent. We have poverty levels that are unacceptable, 750 million people living under the poverty line—absolutely unacceptable. We have got to make addressing the energy situation also

“Africa is responsible for 4 percent of global emissions; 3 percent of those are in South Africa.”

about addressing poverty. And addressing poverty therefore means we have to make available the re sources for that clean en ergy transition, because we know unfortunately there has been very little soli darity with the vulnerable countries on the renew able energy agenda.

Yes, we know that’s the best way to go. Yes, we know that would be even cheaper. But it takes a significant amount of re sources to build the tech nology and put it in place to deliver renewable energy and sustainable energy for all. The challenge we have today is that of all renewable energy investments globally, only 2 percent [are] in Africa. What are we saying about what Af rica needs, what Africa’s development needs are? What Africa’s economic development needs with respect to energy [are] when we

only allow 2 percent of investments in re newable energy? Africa’s agenda cannot wait, and that’s why there is a discussion around what alternatives does Africa have. Because the skin in the game that most of us have is that we are faced with poverty levels that are unacceptable, but we also see very little solidarity from the North. We see very little solidarity on climate finance. We know that we’ve been talking about $100 billion for a long time, two decades, and we haven’t seen it come. So how [are] our governments and our leaders supposed to address the energy poverty situation? Renewable energy, yes, but who’s gonna pay and when?

DALTON: Right. And that comes down to we’re in an age, particularly in the United States, where taxpayers don’t like to invest even in their own infrastructure and their own roads and airports, things that you think would serve the country. So what’s the case to be made for why Americans or Europeans should send their tax dollars to a continent that they know little about, where they will probably never travel and it seems so far away to them? How do you make that case, other than kind of the moral obliga-

tion, what’s in it for them? Because sadly that case has to be made.

MATHAI: Absolutely, Greg, that case has to be made. But no better case was made than with the COVID pandemic. We knew that the COVID pandemic left unaddressed everywhere would be a problem for us ev erywhere. And that’s exactly what has hap pened. We would not have had the sort of mutations and variants that we have now in almost uncontrollable ways if we had made it our business, especially as the rich Glob al North, who developed this vaccine, and instead of treating it like a vaccine for the people to address this disease once and for all, they hoarded it.

We know the stories of the COVAX fa cility, and it was absolutely scandalous what happened with that vaccine. And now what do we have? We have countries that have al most 90 percent vaccination rates, and we have others that are barely 10, 20 percent vaccination. What does that mean for the global health? It means we will continue to be confronted by variants of this disease in a way that would not have been if we had addressed it for all of us. This is this sort of solidarity that is called for even in climate, that we cannot address the climate crisis only in our little corners because climate change knows no borders. We will continue to face the worst of climate—yes, those in develop ing countries will be most disproportionate ly affected.

But remember, they did not cause this problem. We are fighting a battle that was never ours to fight, with tools we do not have and finance we do not have. That is a moral question, and it is still a moral question on climate, I believe, for many Americans to un derstand that their responsibility to address their own emissions decarbonization as an agenda for the Global North is undeniable. There is no clean development pathway with

fossil fuels in the North. There is no pathway that allows you to do that and get to net zero by 2050. There’s a lot of pathways that allow other countries to develop and become a lot more prosperous and able to sustain them selves, that allows multiple more options. We have to give them that alternative, especially when we are not willing to finance the re newable energy transition.

DALTON: Right. And the atmosphere doesn’t care where greenhouse gas emissions occur. It’s all the same to the atmosphere. As many in the Global North look to reduce their addiction to fossil fuels, and minerals required to do so inevitably seem to depend on exploiting natural resources in the Glob al South—70 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from Congo. I’m haunted by images from The New York Times of children carry ing massive sacks of ore on their backs. Yet, I recently spoke to Morgan Bazilian from the Colorado School of Mines. While he agreed that this image is deeply disturbing, he suggested if those chil dren didn’t have jobs in the mines they might starve. What’s your reaction to that?

MATHAI: Well, I think we have to think about it in a different way. We have to admit the relationship, the interrelation, between the North and the South with respect to natural resources has been one of exploitation. I don’t think we can say that a lot of those minerals or the beef industry in the U.S. that is driving the deforesta tion of the Amazon or the green technology industry that is driving mining in the

Congo or even the palm oil plantations that are driving the cosmetic industry in Europe, these are not relationships that have been built on mutual respect and solidarity. That’s where the challenge is. I think that there should be opportunities for countries to ex plore—and, you know, you look at a country like Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire that produce 60 percent of the world’s cocoa. They should be controlling a significant amount of the co coa value chain. That’s just not the case.

It speaks to the nature of trade that we have today. Until those relationships are fair—and that’s why we talk about fair trade—then we cannot talk about the fact that this is what the poor children of DRC should be doing. We know that those children, we would much rather they’re in schools being edu cated because the country is earning a fair income from their resources. If that was the case, I think it would be very different. This is not a choice for children working in the mines. This is definitely not a priority.

DALTON: So can that mineral extraction happen, can those the terms of that power relationship be altered, can those mines be operated in a cleaner way so that people get paid a living wage? Does DRC have the power to do that?

MATHAI: Those are the questions that have to be answered by those who are involved in trade and trade relations. That is an import ant global architectural system that needs to be addressed. We need to look at how we trade with each other. There’s a real shocking in the system when you look at how far it takes for supplies to come sometimes from one part of the world to the other. You look at a country like South Africa that buys its rice from Asia rather than purchas ing its rice from Senegal, for example, that produces high-quality rice. But there are trade barriers, and that’s why we must continue to work on the trade architec ture, because that will be part of building prosperity.

Africa’s prosperity agen da is serious. We have got in this next decade to build the level of prosperity this continent deserves. There’s absolutely no reason why they cannot trade more with each other. African trade is historically low; 15 percent

“We will continue to face the worst of climate— developing countries will be disproportionately affected.”

of trade goes on within African countries. You look at Asia, it’s about 60 percent; Eu rope 80 percent. So we’ve got to do better with trading with each other and building those trade relationships. That will continue to help shorten our supply chains and also build prosperity that is needed.

DALTON: It sounds like you support de globalization, which is being talked a lot about because of COVID and because of Ukraine’s disruption to these long supply chains. It sounds like you support more regional trading with neighbors. Rice from Senegal to South Africa rather than far away in Asia. So, do you support deglobalization and more regional trading?

MATHAI: I don’t know if it’s deglobaliza tion. I support shortening supply chains, absolutely building prosperity more region ally. I think we should grow what we eat and eat what we grow, absolutely. We need to do better with regional trade. That’s how we’ll build prosperity. We need to do better with value addition, that’s how we’ll build prosperity. There’s a reason the president of Ghana continues to talk about the fact that he will start producing chocolate in Ghana. The sooner the better, so that they can build prosperity with the resources that they have. The same should be across the world, and that will be the only way that we can build the sort of prosperity we want to see.

DALTON: [Your mother] Wangari Maathai won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development. She had started the Green Belt Movement, which empowered more than 4,000 wom en’s groups to protect and restore their lo cal forests even in the face of death threats. [You have] continued her mother’s work by serving on the boards of both the Green Belt Movement and the Wangari Maathai Foun dation.

Say more about what [you] mean [about] “basking in [your] mother’s light.”

MATHAI: Yes, I really feel like I basked in her light every day. I mean, to have had the privilege of working with my mother for 12 years was one of the highlights, absolute highlights of my life. Many of us, our moth ers do what they do, and when I was grow ing up I just thought that’s what my mother did, just like somebody else’s mother did something else.

I knew what she did, and she went to work every day and did it, but I never thought it extraordinary in any way and I never thought how extraordinary. She just did her work with diligence and commitment, as I had always known. It was only later that I

started working with her and I would look over her shoulder, and I really start ed to appreciate just how ingenius the work of the Green Belt Movement was, just how ingenius and con nected and thoughtful she had been in creating this in credible women’s movement and tapping into the bril liance of those women, their knowledge. To be sensitive. a lot of the communication with these communities was in their local language. She was very keen that people understand what you’re tell ing them, that if we speak in English, okay Swahili, not everybody can understand. So, let’s make sure that all the these women . . . and all the people working with them speak their language. And that was a really won derful thing that catalyzed this movement.

So I always felt that to have had the front row seat in this amazing, amazing theater of her life was a privilege [and] honor. I always felt like I was basking in her light, and I still do today. Everything good that happens to me I always attribute—sometimes to the in spiration that she was in my life. That’s noth ing to me but light.

DALTON: What a tremendous gift. Thanks for sharing that.

How did you come to emotional intelli gence? You’ve been out there talking quite a bit about that, maybe not using that term. But it sounds like some of that you got from your mom.

MATHAI: Actually a dear friend who runs an emotional intelligence outfit heard me talking about the Wangari Maathai Foun dation, that we were working to inspire the next generation of leaders to be better stew ards of the environment, to feel their con nection to the environment. She told me, “You know what? You really need to connect with Six Seconds,” which is an emotional in telligence network, I think the largest in the world. As I started connecting with them, I realized that it was really in many ways a way to coach myself into how I think, into knowing myself better and understanding my triggers, understanding how I present myself, understanding my own emotions and navigating those emotions and then also

being able to be very clear about my purpose. What am I doing, why am I doing it? Does this give me joy” And being very conscious and thoughtful about it. I just loved the way Six Sec onds was unpacking all of this.

I went into Six Seconds because of my work. And I got sort of a two-for. I went in because of my work, but I ended up myself being im mersed, because I learned from the brilliant leaders at Six Seconds, Jayne and oth ers. Jayne Morrison told me that you cannot come into this for your work and not work on yourself; you are part of the work that needs to be done.

So I started that journey myself, being coached and working with my own certi fication process. It was only after the first few lessons that I realized, oh my goodness, it is really about me, it’s about me too, not only about what we’re trying to do at the foundation. I just fell in love with their programs, and I feel in many ways it’s like a bomb. I would go there and I just inhale the wonder of how they teach the beauty of the philosophy and I really love the philosophy

There’s also been a sharpening of how I think about things and not necessarily be ing burdened. One of my favorite thoughts from Six Seconds is the fact that emotions are data, they’re telling you something. So you don’t have to get anxious about it, you just have to pay attention—what is this tell ing me, why is this happening, what is going on, what is going on in me that I’m having the heightened sense of anxiety?

DALTON: Yeah, Six Seconds is an emo tional intelligence network. I interviewed one of the people involved, Josh Fried man—with Daniel Goleman [he co-]wrote the book Emotional Intelligence. I remember Josh saying at one point all change begins within because we’re looking outward. I re cently came across the quote from Rumi, the Persian poet and theologian, who said, “Yesterday I was clever, so I tried to change the world. Today I am wise, so I’m changing myself.” Which I think gets to—

MATHAI: That’s really good.

DALTON: —what you’re talking about.

“Africa’s prosperity agenda is serious. We have got in this next decade to build the level of prosperity this continent deserves.”

With regard to climate, how do you ap proach changing the world and also changing yourself with respect to climate disruption? I’ll confess that I struggle with this, because I know that all change begins within, and yet the narrative of individual responsibility is one that the oil companies have propagated because they want to turn responsibility away from them and the suppliers back on individuals.

So how do you sort that one out? If change begins within, how do we not fall into the trap of “Oh, it’s my carbon responsibility, my footprint is the problem, not the energy suppliers who are blocking progress”?

MATHAI: I think it begins within, because the reason energy supply is blocking progress is because we are demanding it. We are the creators of that demand. We are the ones who create the demand for fossil fuels. I mean if we shift, so the mar ket shifts. Nothing shifts with demand like markets. When you consider the fact that COVID hit us and we stopped flying instantly— there you go, there is noth ing more powerful than the demand that we present as individual consumers. That’s why consum erism is such an important part of the cli mate solution.

We have to change how we consume. The more we learn about it—and it’s hard work, of course, to shift; it’s hard work for me. I’m a work in progress myself. So just trying to make these sort of shifts that we need to make that we are so used and habituated to doing things in a certain way—taking hot baths in a certain way, not even thinking about how this water is heated that we are using. To listen to some of the European conversations right now when they’re faced with this energy crisis, and to think that if you turn your heat a little bit down, just a little bit, you can save this much if we all do it. It’s so fundamental, this adjustment that we all have to make.

DALTON: Developing countries are often characterized as climate victims. What do you think of that frame? You frame this as very much of a moral responsibility, but how about that frame of being victims?

MATHAI: I don’t like this frame of victims,

because I think it sort of immobilizes people.

I think the communities that are impacted by climate change are disproportionately impacted, and they’re doing everything they can. I think the image of the victim makes it look like they’re sitting there waiting. They’re not. People are working very hard to think about ways that they can protect their populations, protect their countries—especially look at the island states, Marshall Islands and others. They are very busy working on what they can do, but they need the solidarity of the rest of the world, because this is not a problem that they cre ated. Absolutely they need that solidarity.

DALTON: You say that the climate conversation is in tellectual and it should shift to more of an emotional one. Talk about that, how people talk about climate kind of up in their head with lots of facts and charts and figures and should be more from a different heart-centered place.

MATHAI: You know and I know all the science. I feel like I’m motivated by a lot of these facts. . . . We are headed like a speed train in the wrong direction. We have eight years, maybe even seven, to arrest catastrophic cli mate change. Think about that for a minute. We have to do it in the next seven years. It doesn’t seem like we’re in a hurry when you look out into the horizon and see how we are addressing issues of new oil wells or new drilling, especially in the countries whose carbon budgets just don’t allow for them to go in that direction.

The science is out there. That’s why youth are so important in this movement. They actually can’t understand why we have abso lutely inertia, nothing but inertia in the face of such devastating prognosis about what’s going to happen in the next seven years. Once in a while I like to sort of remind my self as well, because I work on this every day and then I’m gonna think about that for a minute. Like for the last 20 years—when you look at the predictions that were made about the climate 20 years ago, they have come to pass and worse. They have all come to pass, what the IPCC said about today a few years ago, couple of decades ago. And

the science has gotten better, the science has gotten tighter. Why are we not moving with more urgency? That’s the intellectual over coming the emotional. Because apparently if we want more connected to the reality of that, we would not be joking about it and we would be moving with more haste.

DALTON: Right. Clearly the way we’ve been talking about it has had some success, and some of that doom-and-gloom scenario as you say has come to pass. Many things have happened faster than scientists had pre dicted, and other positive things have also happened faster than predicted. Ezra Klein of The New York Times wrote an article re cently saying how the drop in solar prices happened a lot faster than even anyone pre dicted. The largest predictions were 6 per cent a year and it ended up being a lot more than 6 percent a year.

What’s happening on the positive side? Because we tend as climate people often to look at the dark side—you know, the bad things are happening faster, the good things are happening slower. And yet, there are good things that are also happening fast.

MATHAI: Yeah, that is true. There are good things happening fast and bad things hap pening fast. But good things are not happen ing fast enough, and that’s the difference.

I think unfortunately we need to move faster. We’ve caused untold damage with the way we’ve developed. I think we have to move fast, but with justice to acknowl edge that there are people who haven’t been responsible for this and who must be lifted out of poverty. Because you cannot adapt to climate change when you’re at the certain level of poverty. When you’re on the cliff you’re on the cliff, even if you have all the best dikes. It’s literally an issue of prosperity as well. That’s why the development agen da for vulnerable countries is so important. The poorest of the poor cannot be allowed to continue, you can’t adapt against that. That’s just impossible.

DALTON: One area where I think that comes home or hits people in the wealthy countries is migration. We know that hun gry people where there’s collapse of agri culture move to seek [food], whether it’s in Syria or from Central America or from the Mediterranean into Europe, and that has rocked the political order. How about cli mate migration? Do you hear that kind of saying, like Africa needs to be able to feed itself or else hungry continents on the move could really rock the political order?

MATHAI: Well, even locally, I don’t even like to think that. You know, we sometimes

“We have eight years, maybe even seven, to arrest catastrophic climate change. Think about that for a minute.”

assume people are very desperate to go out of their countries. They are not. Many people actually would rather be at home and deal with what they have [rather than] be moved around and try and shift and adjust. By the time people are leaving their homes, it’s the worst of the worst situation.

I think that we have to be prepared for an even different kind of migration. The as sumption that’s very unhelpful [is that] that migration will always be in one direction. We must always remember that the tides can turn and people will be migrating south to Africa because they can’t sustain the heat where they are or for whatever reason. We must continue to see each other as part of a common human family. We don’t [have to think of it as] it’s us-versus-them, them moving here, them coming here. No, I think we need to realize that if we are not well in Africa, you are not well where you are.

DALTON: The annual United Nations Climate Summit this year, called COP 27, comes on the 30th anniversary of the Rio Summit, which was a seminal moment in the global response that ultimately led to the Paris Climate Agreement. Rate the progress in the decades since Rio. And what faith [do you have] in the UN process?

MATHAI: I think the UN process is criti cal. We hear a lot of criticism. We hear a lot of disappointment sometimes even. But it’s a platform we have. Many of us, especially in vulnerable countries, there is no other plat form that allows us to have a vote on what goes on in global climate politics. So that’s a very important platform, and I’m grate ful for the solidarity of the United Nations in keeping that platform alive and making sure that the leadership there is sensitive and open to these discussions.

But I think we have to move much faster. We really need to find a way that [builds on] what started in Rio. Yes, we’ve made some progress. There are some bright spots, but the future is bleaker still. We have more in formation about what we are facing, and we don’t have much time to sit and celebrate. Yes, we must be inspired by the road we have traveled, but we certainly have to be aware that a lot more is expected of us.

DALTON: Coming back to kind of emo tional intelligence, is it fear that will bring that speed? Is it opportunity? What do you think makes people move faster, knowing what you know about emotional intelligence and the way people work in that level?

MATHAI: I think leadership is important. We need good leaders who are aware and conscious.

The voting public needs to be alert and put the right leaders in place so that we can move with haste. We are starting to see that there are bright spots in Australia and other places where we’re starting to see the politics. And in Europe, green politics made a come back in very big ways, because people realize this is their lives at stake. For many of our generation, perhaps we feel like in 30 years we’ll be 80 years old and maybe it doesn’t matter. But for those who are young today, their whole lives are ahead of them. We are wasting their time, and that’s why they’re taking things in their own hands. We cannot be satisfied and sit on our laurels. Of course, we’ve made some progress. There are several bright spots, and that’s why we continue to march.

DALTON: Right. And COVID has brought a lot of uncertainty, and disruptions of norms in daily life, and climate brings a lot of disruption. We’re seeing that that kind of disruption and uncertainty brings cranky voters and sometimes those cranky voters are willing to vote in rather authoritari an leaders in Brazil and Hungary, the United States. So, are you at all con cerned that climate volatility can lead to authoritarian ism? There’s plenty of examples of that on the continent of Africa.

MATHAI: Well, I wouldn’t necessari ly say that. I think there is plenty of that everywhere, perhaps no different in Africa and elsewhere. But I would say there are a lot more bright spots than not. We are see ing a lot more of young people coming into their voting age and making a very big state ments with their votes and informing them selves much more. I’m a lot more optimistic about the fact that we will make a difference because we have no choice. I really think if we lose hope, it just means that we have giv en up. And we cannot give up because if we give up, what’s left really?

DALTON: Right. And to be fair, I shouldn’t say that there’s more authoritarian regimes in Africa. There are certainly plenty of generals in Latin America and elsewhere that have taken that path.

MATHAI: And Europe and the U.S., every where.

DALTON: Yeah, not just the south, the north also. Looking ahead to COP 27, what’s being done to put loss and damage at the center of the agenda? And we might explain what loss and damage is and why it’s so important.

MATHAI: Yeah. We’ve talked about the fact that the injustice of climate change is that a lot of people who had nothing to do with this problem are facing untold suffering. Sometimes that suffering is so severe that it’s difficult to bounce back from it. The Paris agreement coded in it this concept of loss and damage. Loss being the loss of lives and property, but damage being some of the re versible impacts of climate change. So you could have a situation in Bangladesh—this was very common in Kenya, in many parts of the world even now we are seeing this in the north where there is a severe climate event, and after the event is over there’s some recovery but there’s also some irreparable damage. And that is where the loss and dam age come in.

The Paris agreement had in it that we need to minimize, avert and address loss and dam age. We’ve done a decent job of minimizing and averting, with all of the early warning systems and everything that we put in place. What we haven’t done well is addressing loss and damage. And this is what the COP 27 Glasgow work program on loss and damage is about. It’s like getting loss and damage fi nally squarely on the map, financing the San tiago Network, which is the agreement that was created to make the mechanism to ac tivate the loss and damage facility. My hope is that COP 27 will see that facility come to life. We’ll see real financial flows into that fa cility or into facilities for loss and damage.

It’s a very politically charged discussion, because a lot of people say that it is about reparations. It may be about reparations in

a court of law, but it’s about solidarity in a multilateral process. When you look at what’s going on, COP 26 is about solidarity and that’s where we cannot ignore the fact that even the Paris agreement coded it, we have to avert, we have to minimize, but we also have to address. We can’t ignore address ing loss and damage.

DALTON: That does sound optimistic, particularly given the Global North’s poor record at delivering on past promises made in Paris by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, [they] do not have great records of delivering on past promises. And what I hear you’re thinking is that that’s going to change in COP 27—

MATHAI: I hope so. I think we saw a shift in COP 26 with loss and damage on the agenda. Yes, we can’t celebrate; it was min imal, but it was a bright spot. And now we push on with the next level of that agenda. DALTON: How important is it particular ly with respect to loss and damage that this year’s summit is being hosted on the African continent? It’s in Egypt—how much does the host matter?

MATHAI: The host matters. The host sets the agenda, and I know that the agenda will be focusing on issues that are relevant to vulnerable countries and especially those in Africa. But let’s not forget that just be cause it’s being held in Africa doesn’t make it an African COP. I keep being reminded by young people that what will make it an African COP is that it addresses in more se rious ways issues that matter for Africa and not just that it’s held in Africa. DALTON: And we recall Greta Thunberg saying “No more blah blah blah” about these international conferences. I think we recognize the importance of these dialogues, diplomacy, and creating consensus, etc., but talk about the youth who think that all these adults talking, communiqués, etc. it’s blah blah blah. Do you have some sympathy for that perspective?

MATHAI: I do. Sometimes I think it is blah blah blah, and we really have to show what that’s amounting to. That’s where they get frustrated; yes we talk and then what? The action that follows is not there. That’s why this has got to be about implementa tion, about activating real action so we see movement for vulnerable countries, we see movement for finance, we see movement for financing of renewables. We can’t talk about renewables have got to be the priority for Af rica, when in fact we don’t fund renewables but for 2 percent of all renewable energy in vestments. We’ve got to shift that.

DALTON: Let’s talk about corporations and markets, because we’ve been talking a lot about policy, international diplomacy. There’s a lot of focus in the United States and elsewhere on moving markets, moving corporations, . . . having them kind of prac tice a cleaner form of capitalism. Which way do you [see] that, trying to kind of tinker with capitalism around the edges of markets or inside an individual company to try to be a little more virtuous voluntarily?

MATHAI: Well, that’s a little bit beyond my pay grade. Capitalism has never been a subject I know significant amounts about. I mean what I do know is we have to shift the way we consume. We have to change the way we con sume and understand that actually our health depends on how we consume. We’ve got to reduce waste. We’ve got to produce our consum ables in more secular ways so that the waste we have is not so much. We’ve got to pro tect nature so that we are not consuming and destroying and driving in an insatiable [way], as if this planet has insurmountable amounts of resources for our youth, that we’ve got to be very aware of how we produce, how we re duce waste. How we protect their natural resources and certainly how we produce our food.

DALTON: How do you go about that in your life? Do you limit your work in Africa for U.S.-based organizations? How do you practice that yourself?

MATHAI: I certainly try; the waste element to me is a very personal thing. Just the idea that food goes to waste drives me crazy. I can definitely say the circularity of our food sys tems and home is something I’m really proud of. The ability to compost in an urban area like Nairobi and bring that composting to our gardens, the ability to cook what is local and eat what is local is really wonderful. And we are fortunate to have such bounty in the tropics of fruits and vegetables and to ensure that our diets are just littered with what is local. I love that. Just being able to produce and eat what is close by. Those are some of the things.

We don’t do much driving as a family. We live close to where the children go to school. We try and manage, but it’s by far still a lot

of consciousness that’s required, even how we are able to live.

I would say that my own activism is about making things more inclusive and fighting for inclusion wherever I can for more non motorized transit and for more ability to walk around and bike around our cities, so our cities are more livable and [designed] for people and not for cars. Those are some of the areas I think of in my personal and pro fessional life.

DALTON: I know you’re also involved with clean cook stoves, which you mentioned earli er; very important. It kind of boggles me that those have been around for a long time and lots of people have worked on that. There’s obstacles for financing and supply chains; there’s been some prog ress on clean cookstoves.

It seems like such a simple thing. Why isn’t there been more progress?

MATHAI: You’re so right.

One time, [a] very dear friend—she’s late now, she was a dear friend of my mother’s and continued to be a good friend of mine— she was 90 years old when I went to tell her that I was working on cookstoves. She said, “Wanjira, 60 years ago I was working on cook stoves.” It just felt, like to your point, why haven’t we cracked this one? There’s I think a lack of understand ing; we’re understanding much more the enormity of the problem; seeing is believing. To start to see the fact that so many people—80 percent of Kenyans— still cook on open fires. Imagine that; that is a huge number of people. That’s why the en ergy agenda has to be about access. We have SDG 7 [Sustainable Development Goal 7], sustainable energy for all that is reliable, that is affordable, more than that is accessible for all. This is got to be a rallying cry.

That’s what the clean cooking agenda is about. Acknowledging the enormity of this problem that doesn’t get seen yet it’s per vasive. We cook two and three times every day and yet we don’t necessarily see this as big a problem as it is. The science around the impacts on health—indoor air pollution, outdoor air pollution—is significant. All of those things together [are] beginning to drive a real push on prioritizing clean cooking.

“The waste element to me is a very personal thing. The idea that food goes to waste drives me crazy.”

exploring Australia and New Zealand

Take an epic 22-day journey and travel from Cairns to the Great Barrier Reef to the storied Outback to sophisticated Sydney to the breathtaking Milford Sound. Visit the mountain village of Kuranda, the Anzac Hill Monument, Mt. Cook National Park and Queenstown. Watch the sunset over Uluru and see Rotorua’s geysers and thermal springs. Learn about the Walpiri and Maori cultures. Explore Auckland’s museums, or explore the islands and wineries nearby this world-class city.

per person, double occupancy,

per person, double occupancy, if

book

taxes and fees from SFO

own international air