Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerveldt. This week we are bringing you a special follow up episode from our Carbon Bros. Collaboration with the show Non Toxic. Daniel Penny's complete interview with Progressive Senate candidate Abdul el Sayet.
El Sayet is running for Senate.
In Michigan and his own pathway to climate and his take on empathetic masculinity through a breath of fresh air these days. I hope you enjoy their conversation as much as I did here it is.
Thank you so much for coming on Carbon Bros. It's a pleasure to have you, and I think I'm one of many podcasts that you've been appearing on. You've been doing the rounds, which is good to see. It's a theme that comes up quite a bit in the first episode of this mini series me and I have been working on and given your ad actually for your campaign. There's a podcast features quite prominently and there will talk
a little bit about that later in our conversation. I thought maybe you could start with just like a brief introduction of who you are, why you're running for Senate in Michigan.
Yeah, Daniel, first thank you so much for having me excited about your projects, because I think you're talking about some really important issues. I'm honored to be here. My name is Abdul I'll say I am running for Senate in Michigan and frankly as a physician and epidemiologist whose work has been about trying to use government to make
life better, easier, and more dignified for people. One of the things that has become overwhelming, I think for most of us, is that it just shouldn't be this hard to get by in the riches's most powerful country in the world. You shouldn't have to worry about the quality of air you breathether the water that you drink, or whether or not you can go see a doctor, or whether or not you can afford your groceries or walk in your community without being victimized by a neighbor or
the state itself. All of these things come back to one central issue, which is that we've allowed corporations and would be all garchs to dominate too much of our lives in the ways that they can use their money and their power to buy politics and buy politicians that allow them to rig the system for them, and so we're running a campaign do three very simple things that are really hard to do, but simple things. Number One,
we want to take money out of politics. We want to break the system by which corporations and oligarchs are trying to rig it. Second, we want to put more money in people's pockets, and that means standing up to huge corporations that have rigged the system that force us to pay more for the things that we have to buy from them and leave us being paid less for the work that we do for them. We want to make it easier to build and scale small businesses, and
easier to join a former union. And then, finally, in the richest, most powerful country in the world, I believe people should just be guaranteed healthcare, and we can do that by passing Medicare for All.
You've had a long career of service, which I think it's an important kind of segue. You didn't just go from being a doctor to deciding to be in politics. This isn't the story of doctor oz God. No. You know you're someone who's been thinking about how there are a lot of unequal outcomes and health for people in your home state, and what's driving those problems. I thought maybe we could start our conversation with how you got started in government?
Yeah, I think it goes back to why became a doctor in the first place. I went to medical school and came to realize that the question in medicine is really simple, what's wrong and how can I help? And too often the answer to what's wrong had less to do with all the physiology I was studying, and a lot more to do with pathologies in our politics, do you get to breathe clean air or drink clean water? Do you get to afford the micronutrients that nourish a
brain or the macronutrients that nourish a belly? Can you see a doctor in the first place without worrying about falling into medical debt? And when you ask those questions and you get those answers, you start to realize that the work of healing, the work of taking on those ten year life expectancy gaps, usually happens outside of a clinic or a hospital. And I followed my passion about solving these problems back out of the clinic and hospital
into public health. I got to rebuild Detroit's health department after it had been shut down by the state of Michigan that forced the city into bankruptcy, rebuilt it around the well being of kids, to provide kids glasses and take lead out of schools, and stand up to corporate polluters. Most recently, I was serving Wayne County, the largest municipality
in the largest municipal health department in the state. We did things like eliminate medical debt for upwards of three hundred thousand people, put in narcan in one hundred different locations to address the opioid overdose crisis, build a state of the art air quality monitoring system, expand access to health insurance for small businesses, and that work was really important to me. If you're curious about what actually causes illness, then you have to be curious about the political system
that's created it. And I think it will require us to do more than just stand up to Trump. We've got to be fighting for a solution to the set of problems that Trump exploited in the first place to come to power.
I was just curious a little bit to hear about the pollution stuff that you were dealing with. I think for a lot of people, the climate crisis is this really abstract idea. It's something as far away, or maybe it's something that you see on the news in the form of a disaster. However, I think people are a lot more motivated by problems of air pollution and water pollution, which are obviously related to the climate crisis, especially air pollution.
You know, if you have really bad emissions in your community from like a highway or something, it's going to increase asthma and you're going to see sick kids or older people with respiratory problems and heart disease and things like that.
One of the hard parts of the climate crisis is that it's like a really challenging problem to clearly connect cause and effect. And that's because it exists because of a whole system of energy production in which any of our participation is really actually quite small, but exists at a level that's higher than us, which is the level of the factory that burns stuff that comes out of the ground to heat and provide energy for our homes.
And then it happens on a time horizon that's not direct, in the sense that a lot of what we're experiencing now is a function of things that happen five to ten years ago. And then there's a lot of money being spent to push back on a clear understanding of cause and effect. So this is one of the naughtiest problems to solve, And the problem with that is that people who want to actually solve the climate crisis too often fixate on emblems of that crisis that people have
no actual connection to. So like, for a long time, the emblem was like starving polar bears. I'm not going to change my whole life around some polar bears. But the thing we ignore is that every moment that we're releasing climate gases into the atmosphere, they're being sieved through the lungs of our children. So you can see not too far from where I am right now, images of kids playing in a playground with a smoke stack right
behind them. And we've failed that in large part because I hate to say it, for a lot of us who have the privilege to be insulated from those smoke
stacks right like to me. The thing that is so pressing, both about that smoke stack and about climate change more generally, is that these are going to have profound impacts on the lives of people I swore an oath to protect, and so it's not hard for me to say, hey, listen, the climate change part of this is like the chronic, long term consequence, but the acute part is that you have to breathe these gases. Your kids have to breeze these gases, and they're winding them up in the emergency
room because of asthma exacerbations multiple times a week. And frankly, if we addressed that problem, the acute problem, we'd be a resting the chronic problem too.
Yeah.
I want to talk a little bit about one demographic in particular that you're trying to reach with your message, which is men and young men who really swung for Trump in the twenty twenty four election. I think that it's been well trodden at this point that they the narrative that DEM's had about the idea that young people were becoming increasingly progressive and that all young people felt like Democrats were their party. It didn't pan out, and
at least among young men. Now there's this big gender divide between women and men in politics, especially those under thirty. There's been a lot of soul searching on the part of DEM's trying to figure out what went wrong. Many attribute the failure of Kamala Harris's race to an inability to connect with men or to not go on the
right podcast. I think that's a bit simplistic. It has more to do with the values and stories that you're telling, not just like whether or not you appear on Joe Rogan that I think going on Joe Rogan certainly doesn't
hurt if you're trying to reach a broad audience. But I'm curious how you're thinking about winning back this demographic that, by all rights, that the Dems should have won, and how you're trying to communicate with them, like what values or aspirations you're trying to speak to, and how you think the left needs to address this crisis of masculinity.
Yeah. I think there's a couple of things. Number One, you know that we do play this game sometimes of people being just too precious about platforms, like how dare they do? How dare they talk to that person they're like? Last I checked politics about persuasion, which means you have to talk to people who don't agree with you. Number Two,
I can't credibly call myself young anymore. I just turned forty, so that puts me in some like weird another region and I've got my own kids now who are definitely young. I got a whole feeling about this, But I remember what it was like to be very young. And let me just tell you the thing about being young is that you want to be bold, you want to have fun, and you don't really like rules very much. I gotta
tell you I'm still that way. The problem with Democrats is culturally, let's think about what the stereotype of Democrats are not very bold, not very fun, and seem to really like the rules, and so it's not like from a cultural standpoint, part of me is is like you kind of forgot what was transgressive about what it meant to be a Democrat where you were willing to fight against these big, powerful corporations to try and win on behalf of the little guy. Like, to me, that's pretty bold.
I'm gonna do something, have some fun with it, let loose a little bit. And Democrats these days, too often, because of the way we do politics, bought off by big corporations. So you're not gonna be transgressive at all because you're not gonna stand up to the corporation to or funding your campaign. And then because you're kind of lying to voters that's not very fun. And then from there, like a lot of what we focus on is, oh, but they're breaking the rules. What would we do if
they break all the rules? You're like, Look, the thing you have to get at is who set the rules in the first place and who are they working for? And I just think we have a clear message that can be bold, fun and willing to take on the status quo of who wrote the rules in the first place, and I think that we need to lean into that.
The problem is that the majority of the Democratic Party cannot because there is nothing transgressive about asking a corporate pack to write you a check to uphold the status quote that they wrote. Let's just be clear about that. And then the final point that I'll say is this, because we're not willing to do anything structural, we've leaned in on this whole social conversation and so we end
up sounding like a nineties era sociology textbook. And there's this trope of like toxic masculinity, And every time you hear the word masculinity among people on the left, it's usually it usually comes with that toxic trope. Now, if there's not another option about a non toxic masculinity. Then at some point you're basically condemning a whole group of people. And if you don't offer anything, why is it surprising
that they're going to go in a different direction. And I'm just saying that I want Democrats to be Democrats again. There's this thing that's happened that like Republicans have gone maga and a bunch of Democrats have become like Republican curious. They're like, ah, we could just do this thing that Republicans used to do back in the eighties and nineties, and that's a perfectly great lane. And you're like, no, but that's not our lane. That's not the thing we're
supposed to be doing. So I'm just saying, let's let's let democrats be democrap.
You don't need to go back to trying to be Bill Clinton. I think you know that chapter is closed, and yeah, it's time to move forward to your point of Okay, but Democrats weren't offering young menic compelling vision, or they were explicitly signaling to them that they weren't really interested in who they were, their concerns, their grievances, some of which are real, some of which are have been genmed up by by Republicans. What is it that
you're offering them? What is your vision? I mean, obviously, as a senator, you're one of many. You alone do not control the legislative agenda. But what is the vision that you have for these young because yeah, I think Mega at least offered this idea that you're being oppressed by women and the woke mob and the elites, and we're gonna get you money, right, give you a tax cut. Somehow they never quite made sense to me how that
money was going to appear. But there are promises of money and that we're going to make America more traditional its values and back when men were in charge, and you're going to feel that power and that permission again to be who you really are. And obviously, yeah, there are a lot of lies baked in there, but that's a good story and I can understand why a lot of people fell for it. So what's the story that you're offering.
The first one is I'm not going to talk down to you, right, Like I've been a young man, I know what it's like to be talked down to and I know it doesn't really quite work. So I want to have an honest conversation. Two, I want to talk about what masculinity is that doesn't feel shitty. And the Andrew Tait version of masculinity is one where you're told that the thing about being masculine is that you could put
down other people. And I come at this, Daniel, as a father of daughters, like, I don't want anybody in the world thinking that my daughter's success came at the cost of theirs, because I know that's just not how the world works. And so let's talk about what masculinity means.
Does it mean that you punch down at people you perceive to be weaker than you, or does it mean that you are a promoter and protector and empower of other people, that you can do that in a way where you can live in a society where everybody's got a great shot at things and you can still enjoy doing the things that you know bros enjoy doing, which I enjoy doing all the time. I come at this honestly, like, I'm not A lot of democrats are like, let's pretend
like we like working out. You're like, if you don't like working out, don't work out, Like, just be who you are number one. But I say this is a guy who grew up doing the traditional bro things who still enjoys doing these things and can demonstrate that, like they're not mutually exclusive to having what you do if you don't my my asking Like I played football in high school. I captained my wrestling team and lacrosse team
and my football team. I played lacrosse in college. I work out I mountain bike, Like those are like things that bro code. But let's be clear, some of the like gnarliest lifters I've ever seen in the gym are women, like including my own wife, who deadlifts one point five x body weight for reps, which I'm just like, that's incredible.
I saw your bench press three fifteen. Congrats on that.
Thank you. It was interesting, right because it was like I hesitated with the idea of doing it in large part for one reason. Right, there's been this effort to make my Republicans, to make Democrats look weak, and for most of these Republicans, part of me is like, you know, I'm not even close to what my life PR was like. I'll never hit my PR again. I was in college and it was a lot we'll just say a lot
more than three fifteen. But part of it is also this idea that if you're going to take them on that point, the best way is to show, not tell, Right, Like I challenged Donald Trump or frankly any Republican in the US Senate on anything, because you guys pretend to be strong, but it's fickle, and so at some point like show not tell. So we were like, all right, we're gonna do this video, and I dare you to come and call me week, especially Dai to come and
call me a week to my face. I just think it's important to demonstrate that you don't have to seed on strength to be willing to be empathic. Right, those two things are not It's not a lack of strength for which you show empathy for other people. I think it's actually deep strength to be able to bring that. But like, these are things that oftentimes this conversation we've had says they code too much as being masculine ergo,
like these things should be shunned. And I think a lot of folks have said no, Like, you can do things that you enjoy that build strength, that don't come at the cost of someone else's power. And I think that is the thing we need to do well. But there's something more here which I think is really important
and I really want to talk through. I think a lot of the reason that so many young men have been fed to the likes of an Andrew Tates or Jordan Peterson is because they feel really profoundly disempowered in their lives. And I actually think we need to talk about why. And I think it goes back to this
question of corporations and their power in our society. I don't know a young man who doesn't feel like they've got a really awkward, if exploitative relationship with one of the following weed porn, video games, sports betting, and if you think about all of these industries, they are industries that exist to prey on a risk reward cycle and dopamine spikes in people's minds, specifically young men's minds. I
got a friend of mine. Our whole relationship like existed around watching sports, right, Like our whole relationship consists of bringing up names of bygone athletes and just talking about what they used to do so well, and then pulling up their clips on YouTube and watching them like that was our whole relationship. And like I know many people who have relationships with people like that. This friend of
mine can't watch sports anymore. And the reason why is because no matter where you watch your sports, it has become a long ad for sports betting. And this friend of mine has problematic gambling, and so he's already almost gambled away his whole home and his four oh one K and he's like, look, man, I just can't watch
sports anymore. And I'm like, man, that is so sad, Like this was a big part of your life, and it shouldn't be this hard to turn on ESPN and not be fed an ad for something that could have you losing your home in a month, right, And this is where we are. And so you've got corporations who basically are working to write the rules so that they are deregulated so that they can pray on the dopamine cycles of young men. And we got to talk about that.
And look, I'm not for banning any of these things, like I think any of these things ought to be in like one ought to be able to enjoy them if they choose. But the idea that you're pushing them into people's faces and you're not taking on the problematic nature of some of this is a problem I think about like young men that I mentor in their teens, and the number of them for whom their for you page on TikTok or Instagram is basically an advertisement for
some kind of porn. That number zero, Like nobody I know doesn't have that. Everybody I know is like, here's my for you page, and it's always right a couple clicks away from some kind of porn. And I'm just saying that, like, pornography is a thing that consenting adults ought to be able to enjoy, but fourteen year olds and fifteen year olds are not consenting adults. And we got to talk about the ways that big tech has played games around regulation to enable this kind of thing.
And so part of the problem is if your dopamine cycles are fried by some combination of all of these things, and then you feel this empowered in your own life because you can't muster the capacity to go and show up in your life. And then you're online and somebody like Jordan Peterson is telling you that it's because of women that you're in this situation. You may just be
liable to believe them. And I just think we got to have an honest conversation about the way that corporate power is being wielded against men's neural transmitters in ways that leave them disempowered and frankly exploited in their lives.
Yeah, I think the sort of the dopamine addict has become a figure of the last few years, this idea that young men are being bombarded with various addictive services through their phones and become dependent on them and then retreat from social life and all of the things that sort of matter that we would say, oh, this is work and relationships and family and friendships and all of that kind of receives, and it leaves it very open to radicalization as well and susceptible to disinformation.
I want to just make a finer point on this, because I think it's easy for us to blame young men for quote unquote falling into it, right. You know, it's like how many traps are there? And why is it that nobody's actually going after the trap setters? And these are simple things about the conversations we ought to be having about regulation. The reason that we don't do it is the same reason that you have, like monopolies in the meat packing space and why we pay so
much for meat in this country. It's the same reason why we get our paychecks garnished every two weeks and four weeks to get insurance that we then have to pay again for if we get sick. It's all connected
to the same issue. And part of the thing I'm trying to get people to see is that like you are taking being taken advantage of, and you've got one group of people telling you that to be strong, you've got to go in same misidigonistic things about women, right while actually this other group of people are literally exploiting you. And I just think that it's important for us to actually take on the things that are powerful, that are
disempowering people in their lives. And I want folks to be paying attention to those things because those are things we can actually take on. You shouldn't have to be worried about whether or not you're going to lose your home in a month because you turn on ESPN. That's not a thing that should happen in America, and it doesn't have to happen. That's a choice we make as a matter of public policy.
Yeah, we made rules about how you could advertise alcohol, how you can advertise cigarettes, and this is generally accepted. Like you can't show someone actually drinking a beer in a beer ad on TV. I mean, our cigarette ads, I think are pretty much gone, right. I can't think
of anywhere where cigarettes are allowed to be advertised. So it's certainly possible as a society to come together and say, Okay, if you want to smoke, you can still smoke, but we're not going to make it easy to convince new people to start doing this because we recognize that this is really bad for our society and it's just not
worth living in a world controlled by these interests. And yeah, I think you raise a good point, Like the problem is not the individual who falls for these highly engineered and well tuned tricks. You have one hundreds thousands of people whose job it is to make these products attractive and to keep your eyeballs glued to the screen. So if you aren't able to resist, like, it's because it's
been designed really well. I want to talk a little bit about the sense of I guess skepticism among young men, particularly around science. This can connect up to climate but also things like vaccines and other public health you know RFK right now, is doing a number on the on America's public health, and I think it speaks to a larger yeah, skepticism around science and the validity of scientific expertise.
I think young men also maybe feel a little invincible in a way that as they get older they may realize isn't quite so true. But we're living in this period where a lot of people don't seem to believe in the realities of basic science. And as a doctor, I imagine this confounds you. You can't just hit them with the facts. It doesn't really work. We've seen this, at least in the climate debate, that just trying to prove to people, yes, climate change is real, Yes this is
really happening. When they're climate skeptics, and it's become like a part of their identity, it's just not something that really penetrates. And I think you've probably experienced this with people who have vaccine hesitancy or now anti vaxxers, that once this becomes like an article of faith, it's very
difficult to dislodge. And Yeah, I think all of these are interrelated in the sense that they really put the bonus on the individual and say like it's up to you to make yourself healthy, and that you're someone who deals with public health.
Look, I think it's important to understand what some of these more dangerous ideas swim with. And what I mean by that is, usually we pay attention to, oh wow, there's a lot more vaccine hesitancy, if not frank vaccine denihilism out there. But ask yourself what waters they swim with. It's usually this MAHA pilled make America healthy again pilled, which on its face is insane because America is about as nearly healthy as it's ever been, just if you
look at the statistics. But the whole idea of MAHA is there's a couple of things that you can do to protect yourself from any and all diseases. You don't need any of these other things, and these are all grifts to take advantage of you. That's the frame. And so usually it's not the vaccine denihilism that is itself enticing. It's this idea that you are the captain of your own ship and the captain of your own destiny, and if you just do these things, you can protect yourself
from everything. Right, And it's the same people who are telling you that somehow beef tallow is a healthy thing, like no beef tallo is just another version of fat, in fact, probably a less healthy version of fat than the one they told you was so unhealthy. That's the same people who tell you that because they made the change in the sweetener in coca cola, that somehow now coca cola is a healthy drink. No. Look, if it's cane sugar or hyphroctose corn syrup, neither of them are
particularly healthy for you. This is a marginal difference. And they tell you that if you.
Get yourself sugar, does you taste a little bit better? I think it tastes better, And look, it does taste better, but it's not better for you. If we got rid of the ultra processed forms of sugar, I think we'd be marginally better off. But do not pretend that because you made it cane sugar, that the two hundred and forty calories in your twenty ounce coke are somehow not two hundred and forty calories of sugar anymore.
Like they're just sugar. But like this idea that you can be the agent of your own future and that you don't have to worry, it's enticing. But it's like a form of it's a form of ostriching. Right, It's like you are being intentionally ignorant to things that are
outside of the degree of your control. And the one point I always make the folks is actually, like the man flu, I'm like, you know this idea of the man flu, right, if there is some evidence to suggest that in younger men influenza is more severe, and the reason why is actually because you have a very intensely tuned immune system, and it's the immune response to the influenza that is so extreme that then causes the kind of death. And there are a bunch of hypotheses about
the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic. It killed a lot of young men. Part of that is because young men were concentrated in the barracks during World War One, but part of that may actually be that it was just more
severe among young men. And so part of me says, okay, so like, you go, you work out, you run, you lift, you become very healthy, and now you've got an extremely robust immune system, and now you get the flu, and now your flu is so much worse because of all the amazing workouts that you did, so it just so happens that I'm not going to tell you to stop working out. Yes, in general, you should do this thing.
But what that tells you is if there is an added thing you can do to stop yourself from getting the flu, maybe you should do that. Shit Like it should be kind of obvious, right, And so there's this idea that somehow I can do I can control everything about what happens to me, and that is a fallacy of modernity. That's just not how the world works. And so I think we need to start breaking that down, which is to say, hey, I look at I understand
why you get some security and thinking. I do all the right things, I eat all the right foods, I do all the right workouts. Ergo, I'm going to protect myself. But I want you to ask yourself big picture questions about the things you can't control, like the weather or the climate, or whether or not you get infected or
exposed to flu or covid. And so there are other things that you want to do and live in a society that do for you, so that you can be protected against these things should they happen.
Yeah, and also that you have a responsibility to other people. I think that was one of the things I saw in COVID. My wife has a suppresed immune system, and I was pretty aware of the risks that we were living with and what could happen to her if I got sick or if she got sick. And it was interesting.
It seemed like very early on the manosphere got really restless with the idea of vaccine one getting vaccines, but two just the restrictions and having to wear a mask and not being able to do the things you want to do. And I think that there was a sense of I should be able to do me, bro, and what do my actions have to do with you? Like they don't affect you? And there was this real kind of denial of the relationship between oneself and other people.
And I think that was something that that has only gotten stronger and intensified in the following years. It used to be an important part of traditional masculinity. It was this idea that like, hey, you have a duty to other people, Like you're part of a community. You're not just out there like self maximizing.
Yeah, and look, I think this is the to go back to the point about labeling all masculinity as toxic. Is like we have inadvertently made the stereotype of masculinity toxic because we haven't presented an alternative form of maxeculinity that is not toxic. And that point that you made about duty and about empowerment and about protection, I think that's a really important part of a more like benevolent mass sculinity, and I think we need to be punching
that up now. The zeitgeist has basically said that because all masculinity is toxic, ergo, we're going to get rid of all masculinity. And I think we missed the opportunity to say, actually, the masculinity I grew up with was one where you are someone who takes the risk first, but you always eat last, in the sense that you protect resources and you protect for the people who have to come first. And that part of it I think we've lost because we've basically labeled all masculinity is toxic.
I would much more have wanted to be able to say, actually, no, don't be an asshole. This is extremely selfish behavior, and it's small and it's petty, and it's unbecoming of the
way that I understand masculinity. It's unmanly to be this way, and I think in a lot of cultures if you said that, you would be making a very powerful argument, right, And a lot of folks would say no. It's my duty to people who don't have the same strength or capacity that I do to make sure that I'm doing the things to protect them right in the society, because part of my identity is as a protector and as an empower and I think we've lost that, and I
think we've lost that to some really detrimental consequences.
You've been traveling all around your campaign, is it a full gear? What have you in your experiences with the citizens of your state and voters like? What have you been learning along the way? Democrats are all trying to crack the same code right now for twenty twenty six, and means for some of them the answer is just shoot a video and edit it like Zoron, But I think others are going a little bit deeper and trying to actually incorporate some real changes in voter sentiment and
understand how people are feeling. What are you like sharing with your fellow Democrats who are trying to reach those same suspected young men who are maybe not quite cracking the code, yet be who you are.
I just think when I ran in twenty eighteen, I was always being coached around. I literally member of people have being like, oh, your bro is showing I was like, oh, okay, let me interested. And this time around, I'm like, you know what I am? Who I am. I've always been who I am. My challenge has never been that I
don't know who I am. And I just want folks to be authentically who you are, because I think if you can be who you are, even if you know you don't code in one way or another, I think people will respect and appreciate what you can bring to the table. And I think, more than anything, what people have a very high intolerance for right now is bullshit.
If I think you're pretending to be like me, or you're pretending to say things that you know you think I'm going to like to hear, people can see through it. I think one of the consequences of modernity is that we're always being fed like now it's like truly ai slop,
like inauthentic junk. And I think we've gotten really good at looking for the things that are real, and I just think it's really incumbent on politicians to be as real as they are, and I think leaning into the things that make you who you are and bringing people into that part of life is important. But there's another piece of that, which is you've got to be willing
to be vulnerable. And I think to the point that we've been circling around here, one of the things about masculinity that I think has been a real challenge is that a lot of the way we've been taught has been to hide your vulnerability, right, Like men no cry right. And I just think that right now, this is a moment to be willing to be vulnerable, to be able to let people in and recognize that some people are gonna be asholes about it and that's okay, Like it's
just part of the process. And I think when you decide to put yourself out there, what you are signing up for is a willingness to be vulnerable with people. But if you're willing to show them that vulnerability, I think the vast majority of people will embrace it and
appreciate it. And also what happens is you can unlock their ability to be vulnerable for themselves, because at the end of the day, our argument is the world is an imperfect place and there's a lot of things that could be fixed, and it takes us being willing to admit that there's a challenge in a problem rather than pretend that no, we're all good, that we actually can only solve together. That requires us to be vulnerable about
how those problems affect us. And so if you want to be somebody who is a leader to solve those problems, you better lead first with your own vulnerability. And so I just think that being able to do that thing of putting yourself out there, it makes the argument that needs to be made because people just see it and it's like show don't tell.
Doctor bel say. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure to get to talk to you. And here's some of your insights. I wish you luck on this campaign. I know it's going to be a long marathon. Thank you again.
Appreciate you, thanks for having me.
I have a good rest here to day. I'm sure there's plenty of more campaigning today.
We're just getting started.
Man. Carbon Bros.
Is an original series from Drill and Non Toxic, written by me Amy.
Westervelt and by me Daniel Penny.
Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoldsaus. He also composed our theme song, Check A stuff Out.
Our engineer is Peter Duff. Fact checking by Shilba Jindia.
Original artwork by Matthew Fleming.
Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheedon with the First Amendment Project. Marketing by Maggie Taylor. Check out the Non Toxic Podcast
For more on the manos here, and go to Drill Dot Media for more climate recording and to support our work.