Life As We Know It, with Bill Weir – Episode 455 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Award-winning journalist and CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir shares the story of his new book LIFE AS WE KNOW IT (CAN BE): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World, explains why reporting on climate includes reporting on EVERYTHING, the one thing that makes humans special from every other animal on the planet, advice from Mr. Rogers, the influence from his very unique upbringing, why there’s no climate change without culture change and why Earth repair is self-repair, and bonds with host Stephanie Maas over a mutual admiration of Taylor Swift.

About Bill:

Bill Weir is a veteran anchor, writer, producer, and host who came to CNN in 2013 after a decade of award-winning journalism at ABC News.

In 2019, he was named the network’s first Chief Climate Correspondent, drawing on his experience creating and hosting the primetime CNN Original Series “The Wonder List with Bill Weir”.

With his distinctive storytelling style, lush photography and a focus on our connected planet, Weir and his team produced four seasons of the show across 28 countries, highlighting wondrous people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of seismic change.

In 2022, Weir earned a News & Documentary Emmy® Award for his CNN Special Report: Eating Planet Earth: The Future of Your Food, and Columbia Journalism Review called his 2020 CNN Special Report: The Road to Change “one of the very best pieces of climate journalism ever run by a mainstream US news organization.” His first book, Life As We Know It (Can Be) was published by Chronicle Prism in April 2024.

In his network career, Weir reported from all 50 states and more than 50 countries, covering breaking news and uncovering global trends. He was among the first reporters into the floodwaters of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Japan’s tsunami zone during the nuclear crisis of 2011. He dodged Taliban bullets in Afghanistan, led network coverage from Iraq and was the first American to broadcast live from Tibet. As a writer and anchor, Weir produced several special hours for CNN and ABC prime time on topics ranging from religion, brain science and Woodstock to the business of mail-order brides and the rise and fall of General Motors.

His live shots have come from atop the Golden Gate Bridge and below the waters of the Great Barrier Reef while his adventure reporting includes jumps from hot air balloons, hikes deep into the Amazon and one fun night spent lashed to the side of Yosemite’s El Capitan.

Before joining ABC News, Weir wrote and hosted projects for the FX and USA Networks and was an anchor/reporter in Los Angeles, Chicago, Green Bay and Austin, MN.

Find the book at: LIFE AS WE KNOW IT (CAN BE): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Stephanie Maas
Welcome to the Action Catalyst. Today’s guest is Bill Weir, an award winning journalist, Chief climate correspondent for CNN, host of the CNN original series, the wonder list, and now author of the new book Life as we know it can be stories of people climate and hope in a changing world. Hey, Bill, how are ya?

Bill Weir
Hi, Stephanie. How are you?

Stephanie Maas
I am doing great. Thanks for being here.

Bill Weir
My pleasure. Great to meet you.

Stephanie Maas
Hey, you too. Is that is that a sunny New York. I see the backdrop.

Bill Weir
It is a gorgeous, gorgeous New York. Love that sunshine for the mood, right?

Stephanie Maas
Absolutely.

Bill Weir
Where are you?

Stephanie Maas
Nashville.

Bill Weir
Awesome. I love nashvegas I was just down there. Yeah.

Stephanie Maas
What brought you to town?

Bill Weir
Taylor Swift. I brought my daughter to see her this summer and it was epic. We had a great time.

Stephanie Maas
How old is your daughter?

Bill Weir
She is 20.

Stephanie Maas
Wow. Okay. Yeah. And you know what? I don’t care what people say about her. That girl is hard working. I give her props all day, every day.

Bill Weir
Let me tell you something. I’ve been to hundreds of festivals in my life. I’m a huge music nerd. And I’ve always liked was you know, ambivalent about our catalog. I love my daughter loved her. And I love that she’s a really good human. But this show in Nashville. It was delayed a couple hours by pouring rain. And she played until her whole set until one in the morning and leaned into it like Prince at the Superbowl and it will go down as one of my top three. I saw Guns and Roses when their first album came out, right? Like I’ve seen every big act, you can imagine she will go down by far on the Mount Rushmore of live performers. I’ve seen her like four times with my kid. I have such respect for her.

Stephanie Maas
Yeah, super fun. So in preparing for our time today, I want to hear about your book and kind of where it came from what you’re hoping to achieve. I really want to put some legs under that table. Walk us through the genesis and evolution of this book.

Bill Weir
Absolutely. So I have to back up a little bit. I’ve been sort of a journeyman journalist, I started as a sportscaster and came up through, you know, bigger and bigger markets until I got my big break with ABC News and spent 10 years there. And that was the first time somebody said, actually was Diane Sawyer, who said, here’s some strange, interesting things are happening in China. Why don’t you go explain China to us. And this is like 2004, you know, and it’s the first time someone just gave me carte blanche to explore a place. And that was the biggest gift I ever got in my career. And I decide more if I can do this as much as possible. And so I started angling towards that sort of exploratory journalism, big picture stuff, global trends. And I moved to CNN. Right around the time Anthony Bourdain had arrived, and they were looking to do more original series like that globe trotting series. And I, you know, came over to do a typical studio show on cable news. But the first month I was on the air, the Malaysian airliner went missing, and we’re talking about the same story every night, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. And my boss said, Well, what maybe you should do an original series, what would you do? I said, I know exactly what I want to do. I just had realized that my daughter Olivia is going to turn my age in the year 2050. So I want to go to the wonders of the world and wonder what will be left in how many elephants in Botswana? How much ice in the Alps? Will Venice still be above water? And so they said yes. And I got to do this the show called The Wunderlist. And we shot in 24 different countries around the world in that in nothing like that kind of travel, immersive travel to shake your American ego centrism and start thinking about all the ways we could do things better. And then 2016 that the election there, it sort of changed the landscape on CNN, and the original series kind of drifted out of the tension and they decided to create a climate desk at CNN, and I for most of my career headed had avoided being pigeon holed into a beat. I love politics. I love entertainment, but I don’t want to eat either one of them every day, you know, and so, but I realized that climate is the one beat that includes everything. Everything in our lives depends on a livable planet. We think about it like a list. When pollsters come around election. How important is the climate to you? I mean, it’s the whole restaurant, every menu item, foreign policy, health care, justice, social justice, food, shelter, transportation is tied to a livable ecosystem, an A, and we just happen to be born in this Goldilocks moment on the one planet that supports life as we know it. And we just we take that that for granted, right? So I sort of leaned into that. But then it was hugely depressing once you go deep into this, and you really sort of drink from the fire hose of peer reviewed dread every day and see what is happening and then go cover disaster after disaster. So when my son was born in 2020, he was a surprise. My partner, you know, was down to one ovary, it’s 42 years old, we didn’t think this was in our cards. But here we go. And when he arrived, it was such a joy, such a treat. But at the same time, I had all this new information about what kind of world this kid was going to grow up in. And the idea that my little boy river is going to see the 22nd century. And so I’m holding him height of the pandemic covering the George Floyd riots, you know, between feedings. And so I just sat down and started with Welcome to the world, I’m sorry. And so I started distilling these into earthday letters to him, just an assessment of things, how things were going awry. But over time, I also became leaned into the innovation and the hope and the organization and the possibility of a better world that we don’t really talk about in this space, you know, and Dr. Martin Luther King didn’t say I have a nightmare, everybody was living the nightmare, he had a dream, you know, and we don’t talk enough about what life could look like if we do everything that scientists encourage for us. technology and human creativity is so powerful right now. And there’s so much sort of waste built into the way I grew up in our in our world, that by eliminating these things, people wouldn’t notice a difference in lifestyle. I’ve seen now proof of communities from the first solar town in Florida, that survived Hurricane Ian, and they’ve never lost power to other, you know, societies around the world, that I just sort of putting these little bit of wonder a little bit of dread, you know, you have to be clear eyed about what’s happening. I structure the book around Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which I took for granted, never thought about the bottom of my pyramid, food, water, air temperature, but I argue the top of the pyramid of needs, which is love and esteem and sort of self actualization that I argue if we pay attention to each other around the bottom of the pyramid of needs, that it will fulfill us in ways that supersede sort of what we get out of modern life.

Stephanie Maas
Part of what I hear you saying is, you know, there’s definitely hope. But there’s also some dread. And I think this is a topic that can be really polarizing, there is a way to bring us all together.

Bill Weir
Absolutely. That’s sort of a sweeping theme that I have is truly what makes us special as human beings. It’s not our opposable thumbs. You know, chimpanzees have those, it’s not our ability to work together in groups, because orcas and ants, you know, and wolves do that. But they’ve yet to land a rover on Mars, or build a stock market and repeatedly crash it. The thing that makes us special is stories. And so everything in our lives, currencies, flags, borders, religions, all of these are just the stories we’ve agreed upon. And they’re always under revision, right. And so, the story, for example, there’s a story that you should spend three months salary on a diamond for the person you love, because they’re this rare thing. Now, there are quadrillions of tons of diamonds, there was just a new deposit found there to diamonds, rain on other planets, the rarest substance in the known universe is wood, we’ve got the only planet where trees grow, you know. And so the stories we tell around energy supplies, and modern life and sacrifices, and all of that have been told by a very few people who have very vested interests in that status quo. And so the story now is changing in ways that, you know, we’ve been burning fuel, the kinds of fuel using the kinds of fuels that burn forever, because that was the cheapest alternatives. You know, we went from peat to coal to whale oil, you know, we burned whales for light at some point. And I think that our kids are going to look back and say, Wait, you at one point had poisonous gas pumped into your house and you burned it to cook food, you know, like you didn’t have a house with a battery? It’ll seem so sort of archaic, but my experience is that if you connect with people about what it is they love, they might be a fisherman. They might be a duck hunter, they might be a farmer, they might be somebody. And if you can just connect with them on the changes they’re seeing and not tie it to the politically loaded words that get used in campaign ads. And just by saying the word climate change that has been so loaded, on just connect with people over cash, you know, I don’t hear As many Meadowlarks as I did when I was growing up, and take it from there level outward, and break down those barriers by usually just starting with, what’s your story, but what gives me hope is there was a study out of Yale in 2022. If you had asked the average American, give me the percentage you think of your fellow country, men and women who care about climate change and action, most people of both parties would guess between 33 and like 42%. In actuality, it is between 66 and 80%. You are surrounded by allies in this space that you don’t even know you have. Because nobody wants to talk about climate change at the potluck. No one wants to Yeah, in the Punchbowl party, but change happens, just by those opening those conversations.

Stephanie Maas
In this journey for you, where has the hope come from?

Bill Weir
There’s a great painting by Hieronymus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights, on one side is just the the most depraved human behavior is happening in the middle. It’s sort of like the Garden of Eden and then over to the right earth as it is, and then over to the right. It’s what it could be right. And so I oftentimes I think about what point of this am I focused on every day, and it’s really easy to get dark. But when I start to feel sorry for myself, I think about the Civil Rights Movement, I think about indigenous folks around the world who are getting up and raising their kids every day in much worse conditions that I have it here in the first first world, the developed world, to try to knock myself out of that sort of sense of Doom or ism. And then the best advice I ever got came from Mr. Rogers, who taught me that when you see something scary on TV, look for the helpers, there’s always helpers in, it’s in a after a tornado or hurricane. Now I get to actually meet those helpers when I go into these places. And so I look for the helpers on the big scales, I look for a folks like Andrew ponic, a guy just profiles who created a thermal battery company. And you know, I got to visit the nuclear fusion labs out at Livermore, after they had successful ignitions. The idea that we could build manmade little stars and boxes, using fuel that is essentially seawater abundant with no waste, no risk of meltdown, once you throw yourself into that world, and you and you tap into people, really smart people who are trying to pull carbon out of the sea and Scott in innovative ways who are leaning into nature based solutions. Those ideas really get me excited.

Stephanie Maas
Very interesting. I also hear out of that a lot of empathy, where we’re really starting to see a difference being made as folks to say, hey, it is about the bottom line, but it’s not. And that’s really what spawning a lot of this change to tell me you’re in my barking up the right tree there, talk to me about that.

Bill Weir
Absolutely. But I do think we’ve reached a point where even if you care nothing about habitats of the manatee or you know, any or anything, just the natural world, maybe you don’t, maybe you hate going outside whatever the case may be, we’ve now reached a point where profit motive is as much of a as much of a motivator as as anything, right? So let me give you an example. I just interviewed two guys, who are the lab partners at MIT, both from India, one grew up hauling water and buckets and thinking about, you know, the basic bottom of his pyramid of needs, literally on a daily basis. And they decided to lean into cleaning up the dirtiest water you can imagine, in semiconductor fab location plants, or pharmaceutical plants, the kinds of places that just use hundreds and 1000s of tons of water a week. And they’ve figured out ways using various different technologies, a suite of technologies, where a factory like that can recycle 95% of its water. So they can not only not take water from nature, but put it back, those guys are going to be trillionaires. You know, the business model is completely different in the renewable space. That’s why all the new power plants that are coming online, they realizing that once you build a solar array, or a wind farm, or a geothermal plants, the energy delivers itself to you. You don’t have to go around the world digging and pumping for it. And once you use your fracking skills from the oil legacy to dig super deep geothermal wells and tap into the sun, which is beneath our Earth, and use that heat to spin turbines instead of burning stuff. Well, the business model is, you know, how do you capture the rents on that versus charging you per barrel of oil, you know, so it’s going to be a different economic system. And this is the biggest hardest thing that humanity will ever do is sort of like changing out the engines on a 747 in flight we don’t want to make especially folks At the bottom of the financial pyramid suffer because we’re taking away readily available energy sources, but much the way the developing countries like India leapfrog the landline, they went right from no phone to cell phones, you know, the hope is that with help from the developed world, we could still get rich doing that. But what’s happening is a whole generation of new consumers is changing the way they fill their pyramid of needs. It’s changing how they think. Right? So you’ve on shanaar, the, the founder of Patagonia, famously would say, to his own customers, before you buy that puffer jacket, are you cold? Or are you bored? Do you really need that that? Or do you or, you know, could you wear your old one for another year or something? If you need the jacket, great, go for it, I don’t have any advice on how people should change their lifestyles around this idea other than just thinking about the hidden costs of filling our pyramids.

Stephanie Maas
That’s a pretty simple, good way to live. One of my favorite quotes is with great power comes great responsibility. And to your point, you know, it’s interesting about the two guys from MIT tying this back to your hierarchy of needs, he was in a position where he had to fight for those basic needs by carrying buckets of water. And, you know, again, he’ll make plenty of money, the money will take care of itself. But that burned within him to go solve that problem. And most people that are in that situation, trying to figure out that bottom level of needs, they’re not. But when you are gifted with all the talents and the resources to be a part of the solution. I think that’s where the responsibility really comes in. But that’s I think, where the day to day person can really bring some impact is holding those with great power to the responsibility. Absolutely. But it definitely seems like this next generation cares a whole lot more about that than I’ve ever heard of a generation before us.

Bill Weir
Absolutely. Because they are smart enough to read the science and do the math in terms of the calendar and seeing what is happening and how fast things are changing. And then of course, they’ve also whether intentionally or or it’s inferred that you’re the generation that’s going to save the world, like, that is so unfair. It’s no, the baby boomers have all the money if they’re not at the you know, they, they, they have to be part of this, but it should be multi generational as well.

Stephanie Maas
And the world is so much smaller today. At mean, candidly, you know, you think about the travels that you’ve experienced in your lifetime. And I don’t know the answer to this. I mean, what were your parents background, what kind of traveling did they do?

Bill Weir
I had a very bizarre background. My parents divorced when I was a baby. And my dad was a cop and Milwaukee and my mom was a secretary who had a very zealous, passionate conversion to evangelical Pentecostal Christianity. So she announced one morning when I was nine years old at breakfast, that she’d had a dream from God. And God wanted us to leave Milwaukee and move to Texas, so she could go to Bible school and become a televangelist. And she put me on the phone with my dad to negotiate out of joint custody. And my dad said, Yes, and, and so we moved, but the dreams kept coming. So I went to 17 different schools and six states, mostly around the Bible Belt, and would then go back to spend summers and Christmases with my dad, the out atheist outdoorsman. And so I was pendulum in between these very different worldviews, which turned out to be great training for a job in journalism, when you’re perpetually the new kid, learn how to read a room, you learn how to empathize. And so I have friends in red states and blue and and, you know, probably have a better lens into politics of the day as a result of that. And, you know, I was the first one for my family to go to college, and definitely the first one to get a passport and actually start, you know, expanding my horizons. So I consider myself incredibly, incredibly blessed and lucky to have you know, such a transient, you know, exposed me to so much. But as sort of another example, I write about this in my book, you know, as I get into the loving and the Esteem Needs, it gets more autobiographical, because I was trying to fill my love and esteem needs in my career and in different ways, and it’s constantly changing, right? And stories are so powerful, they’re more powerful than family. I’ve been estranged from my mom for years because her her belief system is so strong in a different world that we just she doesn’t communicate with me anymore. And that’s heartbreaking. But my chosen family, my stepmother, but my other people are actually hugely inspiring, right? And so again, we are products of the stories we marinate in. And every now and then if we poke ourselves out of that bubble and say, what’s your story and try to understand and connect on that level, I willing to one thing I sort of realization that came to me while writing the book was because of my mom’s, you know, fervent belief and her interpretation of, of a particular faith turned me off so much. But I threw the baby out with the bathwater by not engaging with a community, a church, and that around that those ideals, and never appreciated how valuable that is that sort of connection with neighbors around higher ideals, and connecting with congregations and picking out communities of people with shared values, but that just makes you stronger, and lifts you up. This is this whole thing we’re into is a team sport. You know, you, you had a really inspiring former Navy SEAL as a guest recently, I was listening on the podcast where he talked about how SEAL teams picking each other up, you know, everybody’s got a weakness. And the key is being paired with somebody who doesn’t have that weakness. So you get it together, I that’s such a great metaphor for fighting the climate fight for connecting with neighbors around these things, and it’s not just a matter of, you know, maybe I could get into an alternative energy company and and make a million dollars. It’s also is can be motivated about just strengthening the community for what’s coming. I met an amazing woman who she was an NFL wife, married her husband in Seattle, he played for the Seahawks, a retired moved down to the panhandle of Florida, she had her baby, three weeks later, Hurricane Michael comes ashore and she’s googling in her house, can my home survive a category four hurricane and realize that the building codes were not up to snuff, they survived and everything was okay. But it rattled her so much, that without any experience in construction, she went down a rabbit hole to try to figure out how to build a hurricane proof home and ended up importing this technology from Italy. That is basically a sprayed concrete wall that is bomb proof bulletproof and is now just trying to build safer homes for her community in Florida. I find that incredibly, sort of inspiring, and, and those kinds of characters are going to make all the difference in the communities of the future.

Stephanie Maas
I think though, I really appreciate your willingness to share some of what you just shared, it really brings this full circle. I think it’s a really beautiful story. And it’s a perfect example of what you’re talking about. It’s the human story. And that is where our answers live. That’s where our hopes lie. I know, I gotta be super mindful of time. Is there anything else that you were hoping we would discuss or get to in our time together?

Bill Weir
Um, not really, this has been a delight talking to you. I’d like to say that there’s no fix for climate change without culture change. And I don’t mean culture, ethnic culture, or religious culture, you know, the things that are really precious about human society I love, you know, the quilt of different ideas. And and the melting pot of that is the United States at its best. When I say culture, I mean, the culture of endless consumption, mindless, mindless consumption, and taking for granted the bottom of the pyramid, I think there’s so much joy, there’s so much light, there’s so much mental health that can be found by rallying around communities, and rallying around each other and nature and connecting with the best parts of both, you know, there’s been a lot of policy changes recently, trying to come out of Washington, depending on the party and power of the one idea that actually was part of the inflation Reduction Act that excites me the most, and I don’t have a dog in the fight of policy. And I, you know, I’m a neutral journalist on all of that stuff. But I’m really excited about the idea of a civilian conservation corps, where kids from the Bronx, and Wyoming and Maine come together and spend six months working on trails out west or bringing back mangrove habitats, you know, in the southeast. And the thing that I really believe will save us we have to get the youngest generation engaged with nature, getting them appreciating how special this planet is, and how quickly things can go away if we don’t pay attention to them. And with those connections that we make, to heal, you know, one little patch at a time Mmm it’s not just Earth repair itself repair it is it is. It is good for the soul, the mind the body, the spirit and, and the land around us. That’s my dream. And that’s what I hope this book inspires people to think about.

Stephanie Maas
I love it. I love it. Thank you so much Bill. This has been incredible time together sincerely appreciate you.

Bill Weir
I hope so, it’s really easy to talk to you, Stephanie. Thank you for your time.