2025-01-20
31 分钟You are listening to how to Be a Better Human.
I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and last week we aired our first episode of season five of the show.
But in the time since we taped that episode, the city where I live, Los Angeles, has suffered multiple devastating fires.
It's a crisis that is ongoing as I'm recording this.
And in fact, if my audio sounds a little different than it normally does, it's because I'm recording this from outside the city in an Airbnb while we figure out if it is safe to return.
Right now I'm sitting in a little blanket fort that I made, but it's a very surreal feeling because I'm both so grateful and I feel so lucky that my family and everyone who works on this show is safe and that we haven't lost our homes.
But also knowing at the same time that so many people have, the scale of the destruction is just almost impossible to wrap my head around.
You know, it's still unclear what caused these fires here in Los Angeles and what forces made them as destructive as they've been.
But as I'm recording this, I feel very acutely the power and the unpredictability of Mother Nature.
And across the globe, shifting climate patterns and extreme weather events are only making the world even more unpredictable.
Which is why I feel like this episode that we're going to play today, an episode from the very first season of how to Be a Better Human, actually makes a lot of sense to re air this week.
This episode is a conversation with Louisa Neubauer, who's a young German woman who helped catalyze a global intergenerational movement called Fridays for Future and Fridays for Future demanded action on climate change.
And we originally recorded this conversation back in 2020, but I have thought about it many times since then.
I feel like it's only gotten more relevant.
And one thing that I keep coming back to when I think about Louisa is how relentless she is about making sure that everyone sees how this movement affects them personally.
And another thing that I come back to a lot is the way that she focuses so much on systems rather than individuals.
She's so much more interested in big systemic change than on shaming individuals for their day to day actions.
And here's what Louisa had to say about that in her 2019 TEDx talk.
We need to drastically reframe our understanding of a climate activist.
Our understanding of who can be the answer to this.