Healing the Planet One Habit at a Time with Ethan Brown

Ethan Brown is a 24-year-old award-winning climate journalist, best known as Founder and Host of The Sweaty Penguin, a PBS podcast combatting climate anxiety and polarization. In almost four years, The Sweaty Penguin released 220+ episodes, interviewed world-renowned experts from 18 countries and 6 continents, earned recognition at the Webby Awards and Signal Awards, won first place in Boston University's New Venture Competition, and inspired a new geography course at the University of Kansas that replaced their textbook with the podcast. Ethan's writing has been published in several outlets including Newsweek, The Hill, and Orange County Register, and he has appeared on 80+ podcasts, radio shows, and TV shows. He graduated Boston University in 2021 with a dual degree in Environmental Analysis & Policy and Film & Television.

As a child, Ethan Brown found solace indoors, away from the pollen and plants that aggravated his allergies. Little did he know, his future would be entwined with the very environment he once avoided. Join us for an enriching chat with the insightful climate journalist and Sweaty Penguin podcast founder as we explore climate change beyond the politics and doom. Ethan shares his journey from an allergy-prone kid to a storyteller on a mission, emphasizing the power of facts, solutions, and acknowledging the progress we've made in environmental conservation.

This episode unwraps the mysteries of greenhouse gases and their intricate dance with Earth's warming blanket, connecting extreme weather events from the deep freeze in Iowa to the thawing Arctic. Our discussion with Ethan Brown ventures into the human fingerprint on our changing climate, with a clear-cut breakdown of how our actions intensify the global crescendo of warming. Discover how simple switches in your daily habits can contribute to the planet's well-being and why collective action is the crescendo we need to aim for.

In this episode, we spice up the conversation on climate action with a pinch of personal well-being, exploring the environmental impact of our plates and wardrobes. We stitch together the narrative on sustainable fashion choices and innovative farming practices. It's a heartwarming reminder that personal growth and caring for our planet can go hand in hand, leading to a fulfilling and sustainable lifestyle. So, pull up a chair and get ready to be inspired by a tale of transformation, resilience, and hope for a cooler tomorrow.

To learn more about Ethan, visit: 
www.thesweatypenguin.com

patreon.com/thesweatypenguin

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok: @ethanbrown5151

To learn more about Mindy CLICK HERE

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

hey friends, this is your host, mindy duff, and you're listening to up level your life with mindy, your number one personal growth podcast that will bring you closer to uncovering your greatest self. As a certified holistic health and nutrition coach, I created this podcast for anyone who desires to improve physically, emotionally and spiritually. I'll be interviewing experts and sharing tips and tricks that have helped not only my clients, but that have guided me on my own transformational journey. I believe that we all have a greatness that lies within. We just need to uncover it. Are you ready to level up? Then let's begin.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Hi everyone and welcome back to Uplevel your Life with Mindy. My name is Mindy Duff and I am here with Ethan Brown, and we are going to talk about climate change today. Now, this is a little bit different episode for me. I know a lot of you that have been listening for a long time. I tend to focus more on personal growth and development. However, I feel like climate change is. I was just telling Ethan I think it's just something that we all need to chip in and just to help live a better life for all of us. So Ethan's going to talk to us about some things that we can do to help the planet and then, in turn, ourselves.

Speaker 1: 1:39

So Ethan Brown is a 24-year-old award-winning climate journalist, best known as the founder and host of the Sweaty Penguin, a PBS podcast combating climate anxiety and polarization. In almost four years, the Sweaty Penguin released 220 episodes. More than 220 episodes interviewed world-renowned experts from 18 countries and 16 continents, earned recognition at the Webby Awards and Signal Awards, won first place in Boston University's New Venture Competition and inspired a new geography course at the University of Kansas that replaced their textbook with the podcast. That's big stuff right there. Ethan's writing has been published in several outlets, including Newsweek, the Hill and Orange County Register, and he's appeared on over 80 podcasts, radio shows and TV shows. He graduated Boston University in 2021 with a dual degree in environmental analysis and policy and film and television. Ethan, thank you so much for being on today.

Speaker 2: 2:46

Thank you for having me, Mindy. It's great to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:49

So, first of all, I know I just read your bio, which is super interesting to me, but tell us just a little bit about yourself and what you do in your own words.

Speaker 2: 2:56

Yeah, you covered a lot of it, but I can give more backstory, I think, going back to childhood. I was never an outdoorsy person. I had every environmental allergy you can think of and I had no hand-eye coordination. So I think I spent a lot of time inside, as opposed to a lot of environmental people who fell in love with it by being outside. But when I learned about climate change around high school age, I was very scared, very confused, very worried, but I didn't find it interesting. It wasn't something I wanted to learn about, certainly not something I could envision being a part of, but I was at the time planning to go to college for film and television.

Speaker 2: 3:40

I love telling stories and I felt like as a storyteller. I needed a story to tell and this was just so important. So I decided to try taking some classes in college about it, and that was when I learned that climate change is so much more than these doom and gloom headlines. There's a lot of critical thinking involved and there are so many solutions out there that can actually address these issues and, in fact, progress that's already been made. So in college I was studying both these fields. At the same time. I ran our school satire publication, the Bunyan. For two years I grew it from just myself to a 90-person staff, so that was a really great leadership opportunity, but also just learning how to take overwhelming topics and make them interesting. So, having that experience, having learned just how much hope there is in the climate world, I felt I had a real opportunity to put those two things together to make climate change less overwhelming and less politicized for general audiences. And that's where the sweaty penguin came from. Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Generalize for all audiences, and that's where the sweaty penguin came from. Yeah, I love that. Generalized for all audiences and take the politics out of it, because you can put politics into anything, and then I think it just makes it such a polarizing topic. Um, just take that out and like what are the facts? What do we need to know? I like that a lot. I also find it um interesting that you did not like to go outside very much and now you're that's like your whole.

Speaker 2: 5:06

I like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Your whole gig is like oh, let's talk about outside stuff. So the sweaty penguin, which, by the way, is just such a clever name for your podcast. Now, for a while it was picked up by PBS, and I'm just a little curious on how that whole process came to be.

Speaker 2: 5:24

Yeah. So I first started the podcast in early quarantine I truly just thought it would be a hobby with my friends. We'd make like 10 episodes, have a good time. But as we were going I found that I really felt that we landed on something awesome and I wanted to continue, and so we kind of found a way to continue. And then, about a year in, I reached out.

Speaker 2: 5:47

I had previously interned with the Multi-Platform Initiatives Department at WNET, which is PBS's New York station, was one on climate called peril and promise there were a few others and they would. They would uh produce national documentaries, they would do web series, podcasts, written work, but it was mostly uh that they would work with some of the other pbs shows, like pbs news hour and I'm on poor. But they would also bring in outside content creators to create content. They would license it and distribute it. And during quarantine you can imagine there was just not a lot of content to be had.

Speaker 2: 6:31

So I reached back out to them. I had interned with them before and I was like, hey, we're producing this show, we could use some funding. You guys need content. Let's make a deal. Um, they loved the show, they wanted to do that, and so we worked together from april of 2021 up until, uh, this last august, the initiative sadly lost its funding, so, uh, we were not able to continue with them, but definitely a really great opportunity to get our show out there yeah, that, just like you said, to get more exposure to that show, which is still airing the Sweaty Penguin.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Correct, new episodes are being uploaded.

Speaker 2: 7:12

We're not doing new episodes right now, but we are working on some other projects. Like you mentioned in the intro, there was a course at the University of Kansas that is using the sweaty penguin instead of the textbook, which we were so inspired by. So we were able to get a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network last year to, among other things, start to create our own educational resources that we can put into other classrooms. So we're looking for other professors and other schools that we can partner with to bring the sweaty penguin into their classrooms. It's a lot cheaper than the textbook and, I think, works a lot better for that age range. I know myself, having just been to college, we barely ever opened the textbook. So something a little more fun to learn from. And then we also have a Patreon community where you can join with. There's tiered paid memberships, you get merch and then we create a bunch of bonus content for you, so you can kind of come behind the scenes and get more bonus content and learn more. So that's what's going on now.

Speaker 1: 8:26

Yeah, that's awesome. So a lot of different things going on, but all centered around this idea of just of more awareness around this issue of climate change, which is super important. So let's talk about that. Tell us a little bit about climate change and how is our climate changing Now? I can say that as somebody in their 40s, I have noticed things in the weather now that I feel like didn't happen when I was little. But I mean, that's just one anecdotal piece of information. What is actually happening?

Speaker 2: 9:10

Yeah, so the climate is changing and the main reason why is humans are emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and the way these things work like carbon dioxide you can think of you have your oxygen in the middle and then you have two carbon atoms.

Speaker 2: 9:21

And the way it's structured when infrared radiation from the sun hits those molecules, it kind of wobbles and it retains that energy and then, when you have more carbon dioxide in the environment, they start to bang into each other and they pass that energy between each other and they basically start to become a blanket over the earth where they end up retaining heat. Now, some of that is good. If we had no greenhouse gases we would be a snowball. But if you have too much, you can think of a planet like Venus where it is like 800 degrees even though it's even further than Mercury from the sun, because there's so many greenhouse gases in the environment. So what we're seeing with climate change we're putting more of these gases into the air. It is retaining that heat and that doesn't make every day one or two degrees hotter. It leads to way more extreme heat waves, cold waves, worse droughts, worse hurricanes, worse wildfires. So it's not any uniform change, but everywhere does change in various ways, and it's really those extremes that give me cause for concern.

Speaker 1: 10:32

Yeah, I would agree with that, and that's one of the things that I have noticed that has changed in the last 40 years. Again, this is just one person's hey, look at what's happening outside observation. But when I was a kid and I grew up I'm in Iowa for those of you that don't know and when I was a kid I know we had days off of school in the winter because it snowed too much. Snowstorm can't go out. Roads are bad, whatever that still happens now. However, I don't ever remember not going to school because it was too cold, and my kids. Now it's just like every year. We just know there's going to be at least one, if not a handful of days where it's not snowing, the roads are fine, but we can't go to school because it's negative 47. That was a literal temperature here just a few weeks ago negative 47. I mean, that is just bananas to me and I don't remember that ever, not even close to that happening.

Speaker 2: 11:29

Yeah, Well, the reason that happens is basically the Arctic is obviously a lot colder than it is here and there is something called the polar jet stream that wraps around the Arctic and basically separates that super cold air from the warmer air we have down here in the United States.

Speaker 2: 11:50

But the Arctic is actually warming a lot faster than the rest of the world and the reason is there's a few, but one of the main ones if you think of all the ice in the Arctic, of all the ice in the Arctic, as it melts, it changes color, it gets darker.

Speaker 2: 12:10

You have white ice that goes to bluer ocean water. And if you think about when you wear a white shirt versus a black shirt in the summer, darker colors absorb more sunlight and retain more heat. So that's having this effect where the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world. So this jet stream that is really based on this big temperature difference. That temperature difference is dwindling and that's causing this jet stream to wobble. And so when we see these extreme colds in the US, it's actually due to climate change, because the jet stream wobbles and buckles down like even as low as Texas, and then we see these extreme cold events. So I know sometimes those happen and we're like, oh, I wish we could have some more global warming. But it's actually global warming that causes that type of thing.

Speaker 1: 12:57

Yeah, that's interesting. I've never really considered that. I knew that it was related, but I never thought of how and when you explain it like that, it's kind of like duh like of course that's what's happening, right, but yeah, that's interesting. So you've touched on this a little bit about what's causing our climate to change. Can you go into a little bit more specifics about these greenhouse gases?

Speaker 2: 13:21

Sure. So there's a variety of gases. Carbon dioxide is by far the predominant one. There's also methane, there's nitrous oxide, there's several others, and these gases are produced in a variety of ways, but the main one is fossil fuel combustion, so coal, oil, natural gas. Each of these are carbon intensive energy sources and when we burn them they release carbon. There are also processes like fracking or even just drilling, where when you drill for oil, there might be some natural gas down there that you don't want to capture. So you just let it out into the environment and natural gas is actually pure methane. So that leaking that methane is not great. Or there's a process called flaring, where you capture it and burn it off as CO2, which is better but still not great. So there's a lot of ways in the fossil fuel industry that we see these chemicals going into the atmosphere. It also happens in some industrial type manufacturing like cement or steel making. It happens through agriculture. So there's a lot of different ways, but that's really where they come from.

Speaker 1: 14:45

Yeah, when you talk about methane. I live in the Midwest so my brain goes to cows.

Speaker 2: 14:51

That's a big one.

Speaker 1: 14:52

We have so many cows. I wish I had statistics. Maybe you know them, but I just know that cows produce a lot of methane. I mean, when you have massive amounts of cows like our, we didn't used to have so many cows because we didn't have so many people that we were trying to feed. So that contributes. Do you have any off the top of your head? And it's fine if you don't, I'm spraying this on you, but what percentage wise, who's contributing the most to these gases? Is it the industrial side of things? Is it on the industrial side of things? Is it the burning of the fossil fuels? Is it more agriculture? Who's doing it the most?

Speaker 2: 15:30

Very loosely you can approximate about a third, a third, a third from electricity, transportation and agriculture, and that's leaving out industrial, which I think is a bit less. But those three categories, fossil fuels are prevalent in all three. So electricity, obviously most emissions would be fossil fuels because all the other energy sources solar, wind, nuclear are pretty much carbon free. But transportation and agriculture also have a lot of fossil fuel related emissions. That said, agriculture also has emissions, like you mentioned, of cows belching methane. You can talk about just land clearance and how getting rid of trees will be essentially the same effect of pulling the trees normally are pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Now they're not so, but that's to give a basic sense.

Speaker 1: 16:34

Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about why we should be concerned about this, because I know that for some people listening and I know, especially when I was younger like you hear, oh, climate change, oh, so the temperatures are a little bit warmer, whoop-dee-doo, you know. I mean that's kind of think where our brain goes. First we think, well, what's the big deal? It's not that, you know, it's fine, we're getting along just fine, but that's not going to be the case for long. So tell us about why we should care.

Speaker 2: 17:04

Yeah, and it's sadly not even the case right now. Right, we saw the wildfires in Maui last summer. We saw flooding in Pakistan the summer before. That had a third of the country underwater. We've seen a lot of horrible events recently. Recently, some of the hurricanes and wildfires that are taking lives heat waves are actually the uh, most deadly of the climate related disasters. So, yeah, it's, it's here now, I think.

Speaker 2: 17:38

Often we hear people talk about oh, we gotta protect the earth for our kids and our grandkids, like it or not, we have to protect it for ourselves, and I think that's how I got into. It was the very selfish reason of like, I want to live a normal life and this is going to impede that. So, yeah, these extreme events are very concerning. That said, there are also very good solutions to address climate change that I'm sure we'll talk about. That, I think, add a lot more hope to this conversation, and I'm not the best at scaring people. I like to be Mr Optimist and look forward. But yeah, it is a big deal, but it's also something we can fix.

Speaker 1: 18:21

Yeah, I like that and that's why one of the reasons that I wanted you on this show is because that's where my whole show steps in is like, okay, how can we up level not just our lives, but let's up level the planet in this situation? Because, like you say, there are things that all of us can do. I know when it sounds something like climate change sounds so big and you think, okay, I am one out of how many people on this planet the heck am I going to do? Does it really make a difference if I do X, y, z? You know we we think that it's too small, but it's just. These kinds of issues has to be the bulk of us doing things right, so we all have to do it to make some gains here. So what are some actionable steps that we can take as individuals that can help lessen this impact of climate change?

Speaker 2: 19:15

I think you're right that as an individual, we are not just one of 8 billion people, but most emissions are coming from way bigger systems than any single one of us. That said, I like to. I think there's an in between between the you can't do anything, you're too small, versus yeah, everyone can make it Like. I think there are some things we can do and I like to give people five little pieces of advice. Number one is to find low-hanging fruit. So, like for myself, I love meat. I also have a lot of allergies to a lot of the plant-based proteins, so I don't know that I even could do a meatless diet. Meat does have a higher environmental footprint than plants, but that's okay. There's also other types of solutions to that. But on the flip side, I'm not a big fashion person. I'll dress up when I need to, but otherwise I don't feel the need. So I'll keep my clothes as long as I can. I'll turn used shirts into pajama shirts, and fashion is also something that has a big impact on the environment. So in doing that I can have a little, I can make a little difference, but it's not even for that. I'm saving money and it's not something that affects me. So finding things like that that can be easy and can even make your life better or save you money. That stuff is awesome. Number two is to do your research. Very often, the trendy green solution is actually not as big an impact as you might think. The example I like to bring up is actually better for the climate to if you have a reasonably fuel-efficient gas-powered car, to use that to the end of its life and then buy an electric car, as opposed to junking a perfectly good car and buying a new one, because there is an impact for manufacturing the car as well. So things like that. You want to do your research and know that whatever action you take is actually having the benefit as well. So things like that you want to do your research and know that whatever action you take is actually having the benefit you want.

Speaker 2: 21:27

Number three is to uplift others who are doing good things. I know there's a lot of vegan bashing here in the US and, again, I love meat. I couldn't do it, but I also have a ton of respect for anyone who can, and I think there's actually been studies that show that the sales of an item that's labeled vegan drops by like 75% or something crazy, like people have a real opposition to it and I think again, you don't have to do it. But if we encourage people who do make decisions like that, it will motivate more people to do it, give more social credence to do it that kind of thing as funny as I think some of the jokes are.

Speaker 2: 22:13

Number four is to use your voice. For some people that is activism or protest, but that was never for me. I never feel like I have a and like I always have such nuanced views on issues. I could never put something on a sign. I don't love crowds and loud noises, but I like writing and I found podcasting and that was a way I could share my perspective, work or anything like that. There's so many different ways you can do that, or just voting and paying attention to what candidates are proposing. And then lastly, and what's most important to me, is talk to someone you disagree with, and it doesn't have to be about climate. It can be about books, movies, sports, whatever. But getting more comfortable with these conversations, I think, is such an important step because on climate, there's a lot of polarization and if people just understand where each other are coming from, what their background is, who they are. You don't have to be friends, but it makes it a lot easier to get stuff done.

Speaker 1: 23:24

Yeah, that's just good life advice right there. On that last one, absolutely, I love that Talk to somebody. Or the next time you're on social media and you read the comments God forbid, oh, why do I always click on the comments? But I do. I'm a glutton for punishment and then.

Speaker 1: 23:42

I lose faith in humanity. But then like, read them and you don't have to respond to them, but like sit with them, the ones that really trigger you, sit with those opposing views, just like you're saying. I think that you're right. That is important. I'm going to circle back to just a couple of things that you mentioned there in your list, which I thought was amazing list, all really doable things.

Speaker 1: 24:03

Something that I remember from I want to say like 10 years ago, that you just don't really hear about anymore, is meatless Mondays. So that was like a thing. So the idea is that if everybody just takes one day a week doesn't have to be Monday. If you take one day a week and you you know you don't have to be straight up vegan either. But if you just go meat free one day a week, just the amount of like greenhouse gases and things, you know things, that saves the planet just by everybody making that choice, it doesn't mean you have to be vegan. If you're somebody that is opposed to that, if you're somebody like Ethan and just you got to have your meat. But we all have that one dish that we like, that just happens to be already not a meat-based dish, happens to be already, you know, not a meat-based dish. Who here doesn't like a good old-fashioned grilled cheese sandwich? Or, you know, spaghetti with just the sauce and no meat in it, right? So there's a ton of different things that you can do that way without just being full-on vegan, and I just wanted to address from the health side of things a little bit here with the vegan portion.

Speaker 1: 25:08

I say this all the time Some people feel better when they eat meat and so, ethan, I'm going to say that you're going to be one of those people If you've got so many allergies to, I'm guessing, maybe soy or some other things like that that we find in a lot of our vegan dishes.

Speaker 1: 25:23

Yeah, that's just, you're going to have to eat meat to some degree. Some people actually feel better when they go vegan or partially vegan, like maybe 75% of the time they're not eating animal products. So before you just turn away from it and think it's dumb or whatever, try it for yourself, because you have no idea how you're going to feel. You can read all the research and the scientific reports on it, but it's not going to say anything until you know how it feels in your own physical body. So try that first, and then I wanted to go back to what you were talking about, fashion, which is not something I think our brains really go to when we think about climate change and how to stop it, but I think that's just a great, a great suggestion.

Speaker 2: 26:12

Yeah, one of our early episodes was on fast fashion and yeah it was really mind blowing for me, as, again, not a big fashion person, to see some of these numbers. I wish I remembered them off the top of my head. But not just carbon emissions, but also extreme water use to create a lot of our clothes. Cotton is a very water intensive crop to grow and polyester, on the flip side, is made from plastic, which is made from fossil fuels. So that's where our clothes mostly come from and again, that's obviously we need clothes.

Speaker 2: 26:52

I'm not going to go extreme, but what we see with a lot of these fast fashion companies is they create these really flimsy products that disintegrate. The second we put them in the washing machine or dryer machine or dryer and we wear them a couple times. Sometimes. I know people who will wear something once and then never wear it again, and that ends up being a lot of waste. And you would actually save money if you pay a little more to get a sturdier piece of clothing and you can wear it for a couple years. So that that's what I try to do. And then, on the vegan point, I think so, that that's what I try to do. And then, on the vegan point, I think, yeah, like I have a severe peanut allergy and I'm also sensitive to's not going to do it. But if you eat your legumes and nuts and beans and everything, it's totally doable if you want, but you also don't have to.

Speaker 2: 28:14

The reason it does have a positive impact is there's something you may have heard of, being from the Midwest the feed conversion ratio, which is a farming term where basically it's the amount of feed that you have to give a cow or a chicken or an animal that will grow at one kilogram. So, like for a chicken it might be 1.7 kilograms or two kilograms of feed. For a cow it might be up to six or seven kilograms of feed. But that right there you can see the immediate disparity between if it's going to take. You could feed yourself with one kilogram of a crop or you could get that same amount from a cow, which would take six kilograms of that crop, and that has a bigger impact.

Speaker 2: 28:53

That said, we can't live on a diet of corn and I think it's pretty magical that a pig can turn corn into bacon. So I think there's some good to the process too. But if we again lowering the amount of meat you have will naturally lower your footprint. But there are also solutions If you make that process cleaner. There are even ways to limit the belching from cows. I interviewed an expert who has developed seaweed additives to cattle feed that change the reaction in their stomach to reduce their methane emissions. So there are absolutely ways to do this that lower the impact. It doesn't have to just be our dietary choices.

Speaker 1: 29:37

That's interesting. I hadn't heard the seaweed for the cows. That's really interesting. I wonder how mainstream that is for farmers. I'm going to have to ask some farmers Again. Ethan and I were talking about this um prior to hitting record and I live in the middle of nowhere. I said it's just corn fields and bean fields here. So I'm gonna have to chat with some some cattle farmers in my area and see what they know about this seaweed stuff. That's interesting to me actually because, like, who cares if the cows? I, I mean as long as the cows don't care that they're eating it right, that sounds like a.

Speaker 2: 30:14

He was in our episode on milk, episode 90. And such an interesting expert. Definitely one of my favorite interviews.

Speaker 1: 30:23

Yeah, I'll have to go back and listen to that one. Oh so cool. Well, ethan, I have a question of the month that I have been asking all of my podcast guests, and that is what is one thing you wish everyone on the planet would do in regards to their own well-being.

Speaker 2: 30:42

That's a good question. I think I have to just go away from climate. Something for me that has been so helpful that I would recommend to anyone is going to therapy. I know for myself it has been. I've done that since beginning of college or a year into college and it's just been so important for me to have that weekly check-in and not just checking in with your therapist but checking in with yourself and talking about your week and how you feel and thinking, oh, my friends, don't all hate me maybe. I think if people have it accessible, it's absolutely a really valuable thing.

Speaker 2: 31:37

And again, talking about my inspiration to do climate work stems from that fear and anxiety and distrust that people have around climate. And I've found through my work that people who are climate doomers, who think the world is going to end in six years, and people who are climate deniers and don't think this is happening at all, it all stems back to that exact same fear and anxiety and distrust. And when I can target those emotions through humor, through nuance, through solutions, that opens everybody up and it's allowed the sweaty penguin to build an audience, that is, people all over the political spectrum, from doomers to deniers, and coming into the conversation and calming down a little bit and engaging more productively. So I'm always thinking about what people might be anxious about and how that informs their views, but I think for myself, therapy was a big part of how I could do it personally.

Speaker 1: 32:45

Oh, I love that answer. I think that's a great way to tie all this climate stuff into up leveling our lives as well. I completely agree with you. Again, if therapy is not accessible for you, there's so many different forms of self self help out there, whether it's a book or a podcast or whatnot.

Speaker 1: 33:03

But yeah getting curious and that really gives you a lot of answers. Love that answer and that really gives you a lot of answers. Love that answer, Ethan. Thank you so much for being on today. If people are interested more in your work and the climate change and the Sweaty Penguin podcast, where can they find you?

Speaker 2: 33:21

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And one more thing I wanna quickly add, since this is called up-leveling your life. This is very important to me with climate solutions. I feel very strongly that the climate solutions we pursue should also make our lives better. They should not be sacrifices, they should not be things that annoy us and in fact, that's a lot more doable than we realize.

Speaker 2: 33:44

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did a really cool study where they it was part of their sixth assessment report. They looked at 43 climate solutions and compared them to the 17 sustainable development goals things like world hunger and poverty, gender equality innovation things we all want to see gender equality innovation things we all want to see and they compared each of these solution categories to a goal to see are there synergies, are there trade-offs or are there a combination? And they found, of like 400-ish combinations, only 12 were trade-offs. Almost 300 were synergies. There were some combinations, but only 12 were trade-offs. And what that means is, if we create smart policies around these things, we can improve our lives and improve the climate with the same solutions. That's really exciting and that I definitely wanted to leave your listeners. The Sweaty Penguin you can find at thesweatypenguincom. Our Patreon is at patreoncom. Slash the sweaty penguin, so I would encourage you to join. We'll be doing more cool stuff there soon and you can find myself at Ethan Brown 5151 on Twitter, instagram, tiktok and thanks again for having me.

Speaker 1: 35:04

Oh, absolutely yeah, and I just real quick on touch on what you just ended with there, which was so I'm glad you threw that in there Because, yeah, it should enhance your. Yeah, and I just real quick on touch on what you just ended with there, which was so I'm glad you threw that in there Because, yeah, it should enhance your life. And I just immediately my mind went to minimalism, and not to say that everyone listening needs to become full on minimalist. If you're curious, you can check out. I did an episode with Joshua Becker, who is quote the minimalist. But you hear so many people that become minimalist, that find so much more joy in their life, and when you do that, you do reduce your carbon footprint just by the virtue of the fact that you're purchasing less and using what you have and using it to the fullest. So that, to me, is just one of, I'm sure, many, many ways that you can enhance your life and still help the planet at the same time. Such great information, ethan. Again, thank you so much for being on today.

Speaker 2: 35:56

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 35:59

And everybody that's listening. I hope that you gained a little tip or trick here from Ethan. Be sure to message me if you want to talk about this conversation a little bit more. Tell me how it's going for you. I'm sure you could reach out to Ethan as well if you have more questions about things regarding climate change and wherever you're at today. I hope you're having a fantastic day and I will catch you on the next one. That's it for today. Friends, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe or, even better, leave a review and let me know what resonated with you the most. The more you tell me what you love, the better I'm able to create future episodes with even better content. I'm sending you so much love and light. I'll see you in the next episode.