Spencer Glendon
Spencer Glendon recounts life-altering revelations sparked by climate change models. He is the former Director of Investment Research at Wellington Management and the founder of Probable Futures, a nonprofit that offers scientific projections to help people and institutions mitigate climate risks. Find his work at: www.probablefutures.org.
Transcript
Spencer Glendon:
I've said this to very powerful people who thought I was being pretty impolite. So you know, your kids are going to be ashamed of you. They're not now. And miraculously, even though climate change has been going on for a long time, you still have the opportunity to be a leader.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Spencer Glendon. Spencer had a very successful career in finance, but came to realize that the markets, and our society, were thinking about climate all wrong. Through his work with Probable Futures, he has become one of the most influential advisors to executives around the world on how to think about climate risk for their businesses, cities, and organizations. Today, you'll get an inside look at what he's talking to those people about. From scientific insights to economic perspectives and personal reflections, I invite you to dive into this thought-provoking conversation with Spencer Glendon.
Thank you so much for joining us today. It is a real pleasure for me to have you on this podcast.
Spencer Glendon:
Well, thanks. It's a treat to see you again and to see what we talk about.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Spencer, I've known you for the past decade or so, and you've largely been out of the public eye and yet you talk to some of the most influential people in the world about climate change and how they should think about climate change for their businesses, for policies. And you've had a very outsized impact relative to your public profile. And I'd like to start there because you started an organization called Probable Futures, and I'd be really interested in understanding how that came to be and what its objectives are.
Spencer Glendon:
Sure. It's interesting to hear you explain it that way, all of which is true and all of which is a deliberate choice. I worked for a long time in finance where my work was about trying to understand how people's investment models would potentially go wrong. And I discovered out of curiosity that climate models were much better than any model I'd ever experienced at work. That actually for 40 years, climate scientists had been running these models that accurately predicted what was already happening and what they foretold was really different than anybody was anticipating, especially myself. And so I came to the realization that climate change was likely to be far bigger a deal, if you will, than I anticipated, and I was somebody who had had the luxury of looking around the world and wondering what the future would be like. Well, most people don't have that luxury.
So if someone who had the luxuries that I had, to be sort of scanning the horizon all the time for things that were coming, had inadequately understood climate change, that was going to be a real problem for society. And when I looked around, what I saw was all the people I worked with were ignoring it, actively, and their models didn't include it. It was like, well, maybe this provides insight into the kinds of questions I'm interested in about poverty or about prosperity or about investment or something. And then I just heard, no, actually a stable climate is why all the things I care about exist. Every single one of the things I care about exists because the climate was docile, was predictable. And there's a term in finance, low volatility or no volatility. If something is not volatile, if something doesn't change, you just stop looking at it.
You stop paying attention to it. And so I've come to sort of forgive myself, if you will, for being so willfully ignorant. And so I asked myself, well, what can I do to ameliorate this problem? What can I do to help? And there were sort of two things I could do to help, was my assessment. One was I could collaborate with scientists and use some of the money that my wife and I were very fortunate to have to make public how good these models were, basically give anybody access to the insights of climate change. And then the second was, how can I influence decision makers? Because I had been in a position of real privilege in finance, because I'd had a track record of bringing good ideas to other people in other settings, I had relationships with chief investment officers of big pension funds around the world, with investors at variety of different kinds of institutions. So the CFO of one of the biggest institutions in the world literally called me and said, "Apparently, I'm supposed to talk to you" in this sort of grumpy voice. And that has happened now many times in different ways. And my terms with all these people is that I work now entirely pro bono and I will help institutions and individuals who have influence in the world, on the condition that the work we do together be shared publicly with a large community.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So I want to punctuate this for a second because you walked away from an extremely successful career in finance. You were the director of research at Wellington, which is a capstone to an otherwise very successful career in finance. And you decided to dedicate your time, your energy, your personal finances to working with industry executives on a pro bono basis to help them plan for a better future for all of us. That's deeply inspiring.
Spencer Glendon:
Well, it's very kind of you to put it that way. And I've been sick most of my life in one way or another. So I was first ill in my teens with one disease. I acquired another disease in my twenties or thirties and in my forties had a liver transplant. And all of those experiences did two things for me. One was help me understand risk better, not take a lot of things for granted. The other was treat my career as something that had a limited horizon. I just didn't know how long ahead. And so I had to leave to do something that I thought could have more power, more influence. It felt appropriate for me to take risks, I had so much good fortune. But also I needed to try to figure out where were people able to actually make big decisions because it wasn't in benchmark relative investing, it had to be somewhere else. And that's been my quest, is to find people who are making decisions that don't feel constrained by backward-looking expectations.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You talked about some health challenges and some good fortune, and those are two things that might lead you directly away from climate change. Those are both things that I think a lot of people might run into and they go like, Hey, it's not going to be my problem maybe, and I'm doing pretty well and---
Spencer Glendon:
Well, I mean, I am talking to Ted Roosevelt. So talking about civic responsibility would be---I'd be remiss if I didn't. I grew up in a very civic household. I grew up with the expectation that you participate in the community you're in. I grew up in a household where if you see a problem, you say, well, what could I do about that problem? And I actually entered finance because of that. I thought, this is an area where a lot of good things could happen. It's forward looking, it deals in risks. But it wasn't a place where a lot of other people said, "well, what I'd like to do is shape the world." They'd like to be associated with good things, but... And I don't blame them. Life's complicated. It's hard. It's hard to do these jobs, but it wasn't satisfying for me and it didn't feel appropriately civic.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So how do you engage people? I mean, there are people who understand the perils of climate change, but don't want to try to shape the world as you put it. And there are people who will say, "listen, this is nothing new, maybe it's caused by humans, but we've seen different temperatures before."
Spencer Glendon:
Depends what you mean by "we" and "see." So "we've seen these things?" You got to go a long ways back for us to have seen this. So what I try to impress upon people, what changed my view of life was realizing that the climate was very stable for 12,000 years within a one degree C band. And that happens to coincide perfectly with when we've had civilization. So people have been around for a couple hundred thousand years at least. People just like us. Minus the microphones and the headsets--- just like us. And for the first 190,000 years, they did not settle. They kept moving. And if you look at the history of temperature, you can see that that was rational because nice places didn't stay nice. Weather moved by latitude quite a lot because the average climate of the earth was moving a lot. And then, about 9,500 BCE, it stabilized at this very comfortable temperature for humans.
And people noticed after a while: "you know what? seems like we don't need to move anymore." Seems like the species we live with---the figs, the olives, the water buffalo, the birds that we like to be around---are staying here. We can stay too. And people say, "oh, I don't know. I've heard about all the-- it seems like the climate changed a lot in the middle ages and stuff--" No. There were regional changes. They were within a degree. And we know this because the same species of trees have lived in the same places forever. People have been growing grapes in the same places for thousands of years, growing rice in the same places for thousands of years. And only now do those things not prosper there. So only now do the plants that lived in very specific places really no longer live in those places. So if you take California or all these microclimates where these very long lived trees lived---in many of them, those trees are what are known in some of the literature as zombie trees, which is they can still live there, but no new trees of that species will grow there because it is no longer the right climate for them.
And so many of the places where we're having these big fires, it's not because it's a drought, it's because the climate is more arid. They're the wrong species. These are forests turning into grasslands naturally. Can we adapt? Yes, there are lots and lots and lots of things we can do. What I'm interested in, in the question you asked, is the people who most often say that to me have no plans of adapting themselves. They say, "we've adapted all the time!" And I say "so, fine, how are you adapting?" They're like, "oh, I'm not adapting, but we are adapting somehow."
Ted Roosevelt V:
Now the climate science has been out there for a while, but figuring out how to translate that climate science in a way that is impactful seems to be a big part of the linchpin for you. How did you figure out where to focus your time and energy?
Spencer Glendon:
It's a great question and it's still an ongoing process. So we'll take the case of an executive in a large institution: why would I help them? Well, in every case that I've offered to help them, it's because they have come to a point where they actually need to make a decision about something. They're at a juncture where they actually are asking for help. And so that's a much easier place to help people is when they've already signaled they're not sure what to do. The other is then to go out, and this developed a third strain of work that I now have, which is actually publishing and speaking publicly and being in conferences and things and basically making people uneasy. I might give an example: the JP Morgan investment bank invited my colleague, Alison Smart, and me to speak to a conference that they hosted of 70 real estate CEOs in Deer Valley, Utah during the Sundance Film Festival.
Now they've invited these 70 people for a conference that's explicitly: you're going to learn something, but boy, it's going to be nice. Bring your spouse, go see movies, ski. The CEOs of these real estate companies did not say, "what I want to do is learn about climate change." But they're trapped in a room and they're there with their spouses, which is part of why we accepted the gig. And we explained to them---I asked them all, "before we get started, how many of you are using climate science in your work?" And no one raises their hand. And I said, "how many of you have a climate model that you use to make decisions?" And nobody raised their hand. I said, "well, you're all wrong. You are all using a climate model to make decisions. You're just assuming it's never going to change." If you have put something, a building, anything---and these are all real estate CEOs---next to a river, on the ocean, on a mountain. You have made a---in Deer Valley, you own a ski lodge---you've made an assumption about the future weather and you don't know it.
You've just made it based on history and instinct, patterns that you assume will persist. So actually, if you are not using climate science, you're just using a really specific obsolete model. And some people get that and others don't. And when they get it, they're like, "oh, this is why I can't get insurance, isn't it?" Yeah, that's right. Because someone else is using a model, is updating their information, is looking forward, and you are not. You are now behind by not incorporating a reality for you. So that---you asked about this linchpin, how do I unlock getting people interested? That's the other way to do it is to say, you are now behaving, you're operating in society, as if you know and you don't know. We've organized society in a way that doesn't actually leave much scope for risk management in most jobs. And that's been one of the most brutal discoveries for me in my career, is how limited, especially in the U.S.... risk really isn't a discipline most people want to engage in.
I grew up around Detroit, where the world was so confusing because Detroit, in my mother's childhood, was the richest city in the world in many ways, and by my childhood was a place of enormous suffering and chaos. And how that could come about and then sort of continue, unrelenting, through my childhood meant that the world seemed to me far less docile and predictable and smooth than it did to lots of other people. And so one of the reasons I actually think I was successful in finance to the extent that I was, is that I was just as interested in how things go wrong as how they go right. And that actually used to be an American trait. It certainly is a longstanding intellectual trait, but it's not how most Americans and business people operate anymore. They read the biographies of the successful people. They don't read the biographies of the failures. They read about the wins, not about the losses. And that informed a lot of my thinking. And so finding out where in an institution, organization, a society, risk lies is that most fundamental linchpin is how do I find out who's got risk? Who owns this risk? Because everybody else will say, that's not really my job.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's so interesting. There's something also about climate in particular. My guess is that people that are responsible for risk are backward-looking naturally, in terms of assessing what forward risk can look like. That doesn't work as well when there is a prospective paradigm shift. How do you talk about that? How does that register with people?
Spencer Glendon:
It's actually especially hard for extremely successful people because extremely successful people have experienced very few downturns. If you are the CEO at age 50, probably not much went wrong for you. And so your scope of imagination, even, about what constitutes a bad outcome is pretty limited. I mean, I vividly remember being in a small room where Hank Paulson said, climate change could be as bad as the 2008 financial crisis. I was like, Hank, that is just the worst thing that happened to you and two years later you were richer than you were then. That is a real failure of imagination to think in those terms. And this is why the last 40-plus years were such bad training for this problem. So if climate change had been much worse in the 1950s or 1960s, society would've dealt very differently with it because thinking about risk was just part of civic life.
Ted Roosevelt V:
We've been talking in the abstract about climate risk, which is where I think a lot of people live. They get that there's going to be some sort of degradation of our environment in the seemingly distant future, and they look at it as being out 30 years just beyond their time horizon for concern. But you've spent a lot of time focused on break points that are in the relative short term that might act as wake-up calls. What are these risks and why should we be concerned about them?
Spencer Glendon:
Yeah, and this gets back to your first question, which is why did I do this work and why did I approach it in this way? Climate scientists have for decades been telling us about 2100. The year 2100 will be terrible, but they didn't tell us anything in between. And what I started asking scientists was, can we make available to people short-term implications of climate change, on the duration of a mortgage, on the duration of a simple bond, on the duration of an insurance contract? Can people make decisions that have a one year, five year, 10 year, 30 year time horizon? Nobody makes a 2100 decision, but people make decisions of other durations. And what's fascinating was that the science community didn't know how to do that or didn't know why to do that. So that's why we actually built Probable Futures, was as a bridge between climate science and community---and civilization, essentially, society.
And what we set out to do was get people in business, government, society to start asking questions. We were like, ask any question. We will go get you the answer. Ask something that might matter to you. We will go get you the answer and build these bridges, so that you had curiosity come from civil society and then expertise come from climate science. So we'll go back to that example of being in Deer Valley. So Deer Valley is in Utah next to Sundance, and it is at high altitude above Salt Lake City. Now to the west of it is the rest of Utah, which is a desert naturally. But that desert has become super productive agriculture and there are millions and millions of people who live there and it really doesn't rain where they live. So how does that work? Well, society was built on snow melt. That snow would reliably melt and run down as rivers and could be then harnessed to do all kinds of things. And so you built civilization in a desert, but if you change the winter temperatures in those mountains even a little bit, you get way more volatility. All kinds of irrigation gets wonky, but also all kinds of flooding gets crazy, all these patterns. So it's already evident that that is underway in Utah.
And so that's one. I think the second one I would say is that--- gets at why we didn't do risk so much, was we were able to outsource so many risks to risk experts. I had one friend in college who became an actuary. Wasn't sexy. Shout out to Freak if he's out there. He was a huge Santana fan and excellent at foosball, and somehow also wanted to be an actuary, but it just seemed so abstruse, like, being an actuary.
But actuaries counted the risks for us. And then those were codified into insurance programs and insurance prices. And when we just paid insurance and we were told how much insurance would be, and we tried to get a cheaper deal from Jake at State Farm versus Flo at Progressive, but we didn't have our own assessment of risk. So risk was done by a small number of experts. What they didn't explain to us, what we didn't really internalize, is there's only insurance available for very specific kinds of risks, and those risks need to be unlikely. So like a 1% chance is very insurable. 5% chance, not really very insurable, too high a likelihood. A decade ago, it became clear to me that Florida and California would start losing their insurance markets pretty soon. And that seemed outlandish at the time, but it also just seemed obvious to me and to climate scientists. And so we've already crossed that transom in lots of parts of the world where insurance is in retreat and doesn't function.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Are the markets working the way that they're supposed to be working at this point? Are we seeing the insurance companies retreat and that having an impact on property values and its changing behavior?
Spencer Glendon:
So markets are interesting things, as you well know. I've had people in banks say to me, well, we can't just stop lending to this place. And I ask, well, but why? And they say, well, we have a whole division and we've got all these people there and it diversifies our portfolio. And so there are forms of momentum and inertia. But you asked about insurance and whether it's working. Most people aren't aware of this, but in addition to Florida where insurance is retreating very actively, and California, where the same thing is happening, and some other coastal areas, there's also very difficult to get property casualty insurance and crop insurance in large stretches of the Midwest because the uncertainty about hail, the uncertainty about flooding is so great because much of that irrigation used to happen over time because the north---Canada, Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, et cetera---would melt and send their water down those waterways gradually.
And instead you have these massive floods. And so there are other markets along the Midwest where just people aren't getting insurance. Is that translating yet? Well, the first thing it's translating into is demand by various parties to create an artificial insurance market. So if the insurance companies won't offer us insurance, who will? And in the case of Florida in particular, the state has built first an insurance company, then its own reinsurance company because the insurance company couldn't get reinsurance and is quickly becoming the main insurer of the entire state. There is very little evidence that people are looking at this. Brokers don't want you to know this. The seller of the house doesn't want you to know this. The contractor, the developer, the town doesn't want you to know this. And so there's a lot of suppression of this risk information. And the second is insurance is only a one-year contract. If when you got a 30 year mortgage, you got a 30 year insurance plan, your 30 year insurance plan would now be astronomical in huge numbers of places. But you only see a one year cost. But that's how it works.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What I hear you describing is essentially a huge buildup of risk in Florida, particularly around property insurance. And that risk is not being reflected in the markets yet because it's being subsidized, because the states are coming in and providing a lower cost insurance and there's some information suppression, but that's not a sustainable strategy. And while there are all these incentives for people to look the other way, particularly in the short term, at some point that's going to blow up--- or is it? I mean, is that the implication?
Spencer Glendon:
Yeah, I don't know what the blow up will look like. Will it happen in one day or will it happen in five years and will it happen in a ramshackle fashion with people trying to stop it along the way with stop gaps? Maybe. One of the most interesting things about this is there's increasingly accurate and specific economic research about who is buying these places. And it is clear that people who don't believe in climate change are buying riskier and riskier properties. That actually coastal communities are becoming more Republican, for example, is a demonstrated empirical fact.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I guess the question I have is that climate change science has been out there for a long time and you've done a great job of demonstrating some of the economic implications of climate change and it's pretty compelling. And yet that information doesn't seem to get adopted into action in the way that you might hope. Why is that? Why is it such a challenge to get people to look at the science of climate change and the economics of climate change?
Spencer Glendon:
It's the thing I think about the most and what I come away with is a lot of sympathy for essentially everybody. Did you see the new movie Twisters?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I have not seen the new one.
Spencer Glendon:
The bad guy is a scientist who has a business and that business pays people cash for their homes or land after their house has been destroyed by a tornado. Now in the movie that's portrayed as evil. No one else is immediately offering that family money. And it might not be right for that family to move back to that place or build that same structure. Maybe what makes more sense for their lives is to start their life anew somewhere else, go move in with family, go back to where they lived as children, do something else. But that choice set is so much harder than "we're going to pretend this tornado didn't happen and go back to the way things are." So we now work with disaster relief folks, and until they started working with us, their policy was we get communities back on their feet, back to the way they were as fast as possible. Well, what if the way they were wasn't the right thing to do anymore? That is a hard problem, and we did not build processes for that.
Ted Roosevelt V:
These are such difficult problems to solve and understandably tempting to ignore. So how are you able to get through to industry leaders to get them to commit to taking them on?
Spencer Glendon:
So I was the director of research at Wellington, and I was appointed just before the financial crisis. So there's like a trillion dollars I'm supposed to be overseeing research at this firm, and the financial crisis comes within months of that. And I had had a healthy relationship with the rest of my life and work until that time. So I come home late one night from work and all the doors are open in the house and I think, oh my God, we've been burgled. Someone's broken into the house and stolen everything. My wife and I had a really smart dog. Like, a really, really smart dog. And he could open doors, handles, knobs, didn't matter. And I looked down and the canister of treats is totally empty. They're like a gallon's worth of treats are gone.
And it starts to dawn on me what's happened. Our dog, Bosco, has said: "you know what? Your life is out of control. You don't come home on time. We used to have a routine. This is ridiculous. I'm tired of behaving. Let me show you what I'm capable of." And I realized my life is out of whack. So I go start seeing a therapist. I'm like, this work will tear me apart. It's all I'm doing is dreaming about work, thinking about work. And through my relationship with the same psychologist over the ensuing 15 years now, I figured out how to process things, how to understand things differently. The one thing I figured out is shame is a really powerful emotion. It is a devastatingly powerful emotion. And so if you shame someone, if I tell you that I'm ashamed of you, it's extremely unlikely that you and I will continue to have a relationship.
Shame turns people away. It's one of my biggest complaints about the climate movement is its insistence that shame is useful. But I do think that shame is powerful prospectively, which is to say, if you behave in this way in the future, you will be ashamed. Not you need to be now, but you will encounter shame. When I saw projections of climate change and how much suffering there would be, the idea that I could have known in advance and not done anything about it would mean that each time I saw that suffering, I'd have been ashamed of the fact that I didn't do anything about it, that I didn't try. And so sometimes I'm approached by executives, and I've written about this a little bit, and I say, well, you should know the difference between Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, because neither of them thought the Nazis were great, but Chamberlain made the assessment that Britain could accommodate.
It wouldn't be that big a deal, just let it happen. And that's the position of many, many, many people, you and I both know, about climate change. "Yeah, it's too bad. Some people, it's going to suck for a lot of people. They're going to suffer, but we'll be okay." That is is the most common view of most people. Somebody else is going to suffer somewhere and it will be a tragedy, and it might even be my own children, but what are you going to do? Those people I expect will feel terrible in the future about themselves. And so I've said this to very powerful people who thought I was being pretty impolite. So your kids are going to be ashamed of you. They're not now. And miraculously, even though climate change has been going on for a long time, you still have the opportunity to be a leader.
You still have the opportunity to be seen as ahead. And most of what I'm trying to do is help people incorporate it into whatever their lives are. You don't need to change your life. You don't need to do a brand new thing, but incorporate it into what you're doing. I mean, your own work is like this, and you're still basically in the same profession, but you're made yourself aware of this in a way that it matters. That's true whether you're cooking dinner, whether you're planning your kids' summer camp excursions, whether you're deciding what grade of asphalt to put in your driveway, all those things. There are all these decisions that can be made better by incorporating this. And it turns into what I've discovered on the other side is just a much more interesting way of living. I'm much more aware of the physical world in a way that I wasn't before, and that's been a source of real wonder and joy.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's such a beautiful answer. And we've been discussing this topic a little bit around climate change. A lot of times it gets exactly as you said, it gets framed as a shameful issue, and yet there is an angle towards change around climate that actually brings a lot of happiness for people. And I think that's been lost. It's a complicated connection to make on some levels, but it's extremely powerful.
Spencer Glendon:
Kids get it, but kids ask awesome questions about climate change when we do this. My experience is that kids and old people ask way better questions than 20-something professionals and 40-something executives. Kids are like, "it seems like animals are suffering." You're like, "yep." They're like, "that doesn't seem like a good thing." You're like, "yep, that is accurate and profound." And that's something that we essentially squeeze out of kids. There's a certain honeymoon period where they're allowed to be interested in the natural world, and at some point they are encouraged to objectify it. And there are two parts about this. One is, oh, you can't go back to being a kid except that you have all those same tools those kids have. You actually can do all those things. We just don't give ourselves permission to do it. And walking around the world, paying attention to plants and stones and the wind and clouds, I've just started being an obsessive picture taker. My friend Steve and I just send pictures of clouds to each other because I'm becoming---and it is like the best, most fun text exchange. "Check out this cloud!" And it is not that I went and read a whole bunch of books about clouds. I just paid more attention. And so paying more attention to the physical world around you does take a little time, but it creates real joy.
And then the second part is being more intentional about your life and your future where you say, actually, I can decide these little things and be less dependent on these systems can be very empowering. I think it leads to more empathy. It also leads almost without exception to more community. It leads you to talk to other people. And I don't think there's anybody in society who doesn't think, you know what we need is slightly less isolation, less indoors, and less alone. And so being aware, connected, and outdoors more of the time, it's hard to argue with that as good medicine. So it is, I think, an easy invitation to make.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Spencer, you made a quote recently that kind of caught my attention at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which I think ties into this really nicely where you said: "make friends, learn to cook, dance and sing." And that those were climate strategies. Was that what you were getting at with this?
Spencer Glendon:
Exactly. So we'll go through it. Make friends: if something bad happens to you, the idea that to your house friends are where you go. I have a friend named Pedro who grew up with divorced parents, one parent in San Diego and one in Tijuana. And he is like, if something bad happens to people in San Diego, their lives fall apart. Something bad happens in Tijuana, you got friends. Nobody expects everything to go perfectly. People have extra cans of things, they have extra dried rice, they're ready to bring somebody in for the meal. They have a community. So having friends is a better insurance policy often than anything else. And you are someone else's insurance policy. You are the place they can go. Learn to cook: learn to cook I can't emphasize enough if you can learn how to caramelize onions or peppers or garlic, you can learn to cook lots of things.
And if the food supply changes, if your budget changes, if your opportunity set changes, if all of a sudden a Korean market opens up near you, you can do a whole bunch of stuff. Whereas if you say, you know what I love is burgers. Burgers are all I'm eating. You are dependent on a lot of things going your way. And so learning to cook gives you flexibility, nourishes you, and allows you to entertain other people. And then dance and sing: humans have danced and sung even before they were civilized, before they settled. Group singing is a magical thing. It is a really powerful thing to be part of a group of people singing. I'm pretty sure that the French resistance had great parties. It was hard work, it was grim. But you know what? Once in a while, it's just great to have a good party, to dance, to sing, to make music. Music transcends climate change. It is one of the most amazing things humans have done and continue to do, and most of us are too passive in it. We just listen to it. Participate, either physically by dancing or making the noise yourself. Even if the power goes out, you can dance and sing. And so those are both extreme and modest climate adaptation strategies. They're literal.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Spencer, we ask everybody one question---and I'm very curious, given this conversation, what your answer is---but the question is: what does it mean to be a good citizen?
Spencer Glendon:
So the definition of a good citizen is being a participant, and I think that can be pretty modest. But being... the first part of participant, you'll see my love of words here, is "part": being a part of something. I take Robert Putnam's work very seriously, I take the work of philosophers long before him about the decline of religion very seriously. We have lost civic spaces. Those civic spaces used to include all kinds of gathering. And the other part of what does it mean, like what does it mean to me, what can it mean to a person, is that we are social creatures and it means belonging. It's, I think the most pernicious part of finance and using a financial or analytical mindset too much is this idea of buying and selling is not civic. The idea of buying and selling strategically for better outcomes is not civic.
And so I go back to... there's a book by a man named Hirschman called "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty." There are three ways he says to participate in society when the leader---you're not in charge, but other people in charge. And when those people are in charge and they do something you don't like, you can leave, which is selling. You can speak up just using your voice, or you can just remain loyal even though you don't agree. Those are all valid choices under different circumstances. But I think interrogating, which am I doing in the world? Am I using my voice just through my absence or presence, my selling or buying? Am I saying something or listening? Am I participating in a conversation? Or am I just joining a team out of loyalty that I'll follow no matter where we all wind up. And I understand all three choices as valid, but I do think we need a lot more voice, a lot more participation. And Putnam's famous "Bowling Alone" was bowl together instead of bowling alone. Join a league, do something fun together, that is, where you are a participant. There was a while when kids were getting---people were complaining about participation trophies as sort of some symptom of coddling children. The parents who aren't part of anything, who criticize participation trophies, they're not helping.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Spencer, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. This conversation went in a number of directions I had not anticipated at the beginning, but I am thrilled in the direction that it went in, and I think there's some really sage advice in here. So thank you very, very much for taking the time with us.
Spencer Glendon:
Oh, it's my pleasure, Ted. Thanks for being so thoughtful in the things you do and inviting me here. Be well.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you, Spencer, both for your detailed explanations and the personal revelations. I'm really grateful for the time you gave me and the incredible insights you imparted. And I'm confident you have a new audience now, ready to make friends, learn to cook, dance, and sing. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this special in-depth episode. Please share it online or with friends and leave us a review. It helps us reach more thoughtful people like you.
Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.