We have a cool surprise coming this year. It's our first total crossover partnership season with a podcast called Non Toxic, hosted by Daniel Penny. Hi.
I'm Daniel Penny. I am the host of Non Toxic. I'm a journalist and critic who's been working in the intersection between climate and culture for a long while now, and I've been particularly interested in the ways that masculinity and the climate crisis seem to be increasingly entwined together
in our politics and our culture. I've been working on this show for a few years, but I'm really excited to take things to the next level with the help of Drilled and Amy, and we have a really exciting season planned of a Non Toxic ex Drilled collaboration.
Daniel's here with me today. We're going to talk a little bit about what he's been doing and what we can expect in this season.
Hi, Daniel, Hey me.
Daniel. Can you tell us a little bit about what were you working on before you got into doing a podcast? Were you writing about this stuff? Is that what prompted the podcast?
Sure, I've had kind of a securitous route, I guess in all of this, I'm mostly thought of myself as a writer. I started my career more in the cultural criticism space. I was writing a lot for like the Boston Review had a big early essay about Milo Yanopolis and the aesthetics of fascism back in like twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen. I don't know if anybody remembers him, but.
I do. Yeah, it's wild that he's kind of like out of the picture. I feel like his brand of stuff is kind of mainstream alma it is.
He was ahead of his time. I think the problem was that he spoke openly in defense of pedophilia, and that was a bridge too far for even you know, the genocidal maniacs in far right. So I was doing a lot of cultural criticism around kind of politics the Internet, and I was also writing about art and fashion, and I'd always had an interest in sustainability and was increasingly
trying to take my fashion writing in that direction. I had a good friend Emily Chan, who's the sustainability editor at British Vogue, and I was writing things for GQ, and I felt like, we why can't I do more of that? But I kept getting rejections from editors. So like guys don't care about this, Like nobody's reading this.
And I got pretty annoyed with that line. I felt like I couldn't possibly be true that, like male readers were just totally uninterested in any discussion of the climate crisis.
Or it's really interesting wow, So this is like GQ standard men's magazine and stuff. We're saying, yeah, that's really interesting wow.
And I was coming back. I was on a train back from like a London Fashion Week event and coming back to Cambridge, where I was living at the time, and I just thought, like, this can't be all there is, you know, like, this is not this is not really what I set out to do, and this isn't what I care about, and I need to do something else, And if editors are telling me no, then I need to just strike out on my own and kind of get back to my roots a bit as a critic
and essayist and someone who thinks about culture more broadly and deeply than I felt I was being paid to do at the time. So yeah, I just I thought, Okay, I care about climate I think other men do, but I think the conversation, especially at that time, it felt like all of the people that I was talking to about it were women, and that especially like in the sort of fashion sustainability space, it was a very female dominated space, at least in terms of you was talking.
It didn't mean that the people who actually had the levers of power were all women. In fact, I think it's the opposite, but in terms of who the faces were. And I thought like, oh, that's interesting, what's that about.
And I think it was also just a time where more and more I was seeing kind of entertaate and this kind of rise of the in cell and all of these kind of related politics of grievance around masculinity, and they seemed to often be talking about certain ideas related to the nature of men and women, and the idea of the natural was very important to them in
one way or another. And then it actually really kind of came together when Andrew Tate got arrested, because all of that started with this Twitter exchange between him and Greta.
Oh I don't think I ever even knew that. Wow.
So he was boasting about his collection of gas guzzling cars, trying to like troll her.
And that's like how they found him, right.
Well, yeah, so then they had this kind of like back and forth, and it's I've never gotten confirmation that this is true or not from like the Romanian police.
I've never seen any documentation proving it. But the story was that there was like a sort of Romanian brand of pizza box that was in one of the videos or photographs that had released, and they used it to confirm that he was in the country and issue there, you know, sex trafficking warrant for his arrest because I think, again, this is a legend that they couldn't confirm that he was in Romania at the time because I guess he wasn't leaving his man lair and it was, you know,
the presence of this, but it just seemed like, wow, it's all right here.
It's like well connected. Wow, Yeah, that's really interesting, and.
I thought, okay, I just need to do a season interview people who are working in this space and see what I can find. And yeah, been going for a few years now.
That's so interesting. I don't know if we've ever talked about this, but I actually started out doing arts and culture writing too.
I always thought you were started out as a business writer.
No, although I did spend some time doing that as well. Know, I applied for an internship at this arts and culture magazine, and I showed up the first day like did my thing. And then I showed up the second day and the entire editorial staff had quit because the publisher was this sort of stereotypical megalomaniac monster that was really art work for So he made me and the other intern temporary co managing editors and was like, oh my god, let's
see how you guys do. And then the next day the other intern showed up five minutes late, so he fired her.
What So that was a magazine of one person.
Yeah, it was me. The art director was still there, he had not left, and then the creative director was in New York, so he was still around because he didn't actually have to deal day to day with this guy. So it was just me, the creative director and the art director. And I mean, I was like twenty four. He's like, okay, it's you kid. We've got an issue
do with the printers in two weeks. And I talked to the creative director and he's like, Yeah, this is going to be our first politics issue, and we're going to do an interview with Ralph Nader and an interview with Noam Chomsky and it's going to be really cool. This was like, had been up to that point almost exclusively a fashion an art magazine, but this guy was trying to like inject politics. It was like two thousand and five, I want to say something like.
That interesting and Ralph Nader was still relevant.
Yeah to this guy anyway. Anyway, So I was like, Okay, cool, when are those interviews coming in? And he was like, oh, we haven't booked them or assigned writers to those stories.
Oh my god.
It was just a wish list, you know. But I was like young and inexperienced and didn't know any better and was trying to turn this temporary gig to permanent. So I was like, Okay, we're going to do it, and we did. We actually got those interviews and pulled together a really great issue and that became my job. But yeah, I did mostly film reviews. I wrote about like cultural trends, and it was really fun. I enjoyed
it a lot. And then I also quit spontaneously because after a while you just couldn't keep dealing with that guy. It became almost impossible for me to actually work because I would come and as soon as he would come to the office, he would insist that I sit at his desk so he could dictate all of his emails for me to type for him.
Oh so you became his secretary as well as the managing editor of Implication.
You would like pace behind me, and like ninety percent of his emails were like mad emails. We just sort of stop around behind me dictating these emails, including to the woman who delivered our mail, who he had an endless ongoing battle with.
Yeah.
So I had started coming into work at like five am, just so I could get stuff done before he showed up, because he was taking over my day. At one point, he exploded at me about something and I just like hurled my keys at his head and said I quit and like left and never went back. But then I was like, oh shit, I have to pay rent in two weeks. And a friend of mine was working for an engineering firm. He's like, okay, well we need someone
to do some copywriting. It's really boring, but it pays well and they'll just pay you as you go so it pays quickly. I was like, perfect, sign me up. They just needed someone to write case studies of some of their projects, and then one of their projects was re engineering off ore oil platforms for Shell in the mid to late nineties to deal with sea level rise.
And I was like, huh, that's interesting because I feel like Shell was not even admitting that sea level rise was going to be a problem in the late night. So I looked into it and sure enough they were not. And I pitched that story to a small environmental magazine and basically that's what put me on everything I've been doing since then, So.
You know, amazing. I had no idea went out.
For paying the rent.
Daniel, Yeah, I'll tell you on that one.
Let's talk about what we're planning for this crossover season. So actually, first I want to ask you a little bit more about Non Toxic and like that, what are some of your favorite episodes that you guys had to I.
Did do an interview with the artist and filmmaker Richard Moss,
which has consistently been one of my audience's favorite conversations. Yeah, he did this amazing film photo installation project called Broken Specter that was kind of deep in the Amazon focused on the mining and lawugging communities that are illegally extracting resources in these kind of wild West towns, and I don't know, just through his sheer irish charm managed to inveigle himself into these camps with these guys who are doing this work, And I thought it was one The
art is just really beautiful and visually complex. He's using all of these different kind of visual technologies and different types of satellite imagery, microscopic, all of these things like
UV to kind of bring different elements to light. But also just like the way that he was able to tell the human side of this story, the kind of the machismo of these places, the effects that it has on women es actually indigenous women who live near these illegal encampments, And yeah, I felt like he really was
hitting like every note that I was interested in. And he you know, he'd spent over a year making this, so he had a kind of a deep well of stories to draw from, and he was very like reflective on kind of the process of making the piece as well, which I thought was just really powerful and useful to understand that it's not just here's this cool art project, but this is the story of how it was made.
What are some of the things that you're seeing right now that you're like, oh, yeah, this is where I thought this trend was going, or I don't know that are just peauking your interest in this area.
I mean, I think for this season, the kind of central node is going to be the reelection of Trump. That's it's kind of an inescapable fact that I thought was was maybe I thought Trump was going to be in the rear view mirror, like especially once Biden dropped out, I kind of thought, oh, this is the end of nontoxic Kamala will be president.
Oh you sweet summer child.
It's like, who's going to care about this? You know, these internet chads are going to go back into their hole. But obviously, yeah, that's not what happened. And I think the sort of the twin forces. I mean, there are many forces that animated Trump's rise, but I think two that are of particular import are the kind of masculinity, grievance, politics of the right, and then also like fossil fuel money. You know, he made a deal at mar A Lago where he said, give me a billion dollars.
And I'll make your dreams come true and I'll yeah, and they did. I know.
It's really so I think that his administration kind of brings together in human form and through its policies. You know, it's war on the so called gender ideology, and it's warm environmental regulations, it's you know, complete gutting of the EPA. Like there they and they very much understand that project is being intertwined. They want to go back to an era when men were in charge and the economy ran on fossil fuels, and they see those two things as
being kind of mutually constitutive. We're going to talk about that this season with Kara Daggett and during an episode on Petro masculinity, which is this concept she coined, I think, yeah, that for me is is kind of the inescapable fact that these these things are very much like a singular ideology and they need to be understood together. I think also something that has been a thread throughout my work is that, you know, the kind of climate denial or
climate refusal often takes kind of uniquely masculine forms. So things like the needing to drive a huge pickup truck roll coal and being an obsession with meat, which is a huge contributor to the climate crisis. Like a lot of the signifiers of contemporary masculinity are totally bound up in kind of profligate environmental destruction in one way or another, and that is a bizarre not to me, a wicked not.
I guess we have to try to untangle if we're going to kind of change social norms and build the consensus around climate action. I think, you know, one of the things that I started with was a premise for Steve Bannon that politics is downstream of culture. And I thought, okay, well, what are the cultural factors that are kind of producing this either political inaction or and now at this point political rollback of so many of the protections that we thought we had, And how are we going to fight
that battle? Like, it's not just a matter of coming up with the right policy. And I think that this is an analysis that ultimately is oriented towards some kind of political action. I'm not acting as a neutral arbiter. I'm very much an interested party and also like I'm a man, you know, in case listeners hadn't figured that out yet, I'm in reveal. I think a lot about
kind of what masculinity has become. We've lived through the like the me too era, and now the complete reversal of the me too era, and I see, you know, I've seen kind of the backsliding on gen Z.
I thought that I've been calling it the U two era.
It's been so disheartening to see younger men drift into this right wing, anti feminist, anti environmental, kind of anti everything. I mean, it's a kind of deeply nihilistic reactionary position that doesn't necessarily have any kind of I mean, it does have goals sometimes, but I think for a lot of these young men it's it's just attractive because it's a rejection of you know, mommy and like scolding teachers and all of these kinds of figures in their lives
that they resent for telling them now right right? And how are we going to undo that? How we're going to move forward on that? We need a real reckoning with the social, economic, psychological, gendered conditions in our culture that are priming the pump for this situation.
It reminds me well two things. First, like, for the folks who are anti climate action, it always goes along with anti equity of all kinds, gender, racial, class, whatever, being very like anti LGBTQ, anti labor. It's all kind of bundled together. I talk about it as the right actually being way more intersectional than the left at the moment, and we need to realize that these things are always going together. And then on the culture side, kind of
similar to how Steve Bannon has talked about this. For part of the book research, I went to an archive of this big network of conservative think tanks. It's called the Atlas Network. The Atlas Network think tanks which include a lot of the groups that were involved in Project twenty twenty five, for example, Heritage Foundation, all the Koch
Brothers foundations are all they're all up in there. But in this archive, I was looking through a bunch of their founding documents even before they officially existed, like in the late seventies and early eighties, as they were getting going. And they're very very clear about this idea that they are not trying to put forth or achieve any particular policy, that their job is to sort of seed the cultural and intellectual soil in which future policies can take hold.
And I just don't think that there has been any kind of similar effort on the left or progressive side of things. I think a lot of people who are creatives or who work in culture have tended to be progressive, and therefore, like maybe some of those ideas have found their way into culture. But I don't know that there's been this super concerted, well funded, long term effort in the way.
That's not sure if you ask Tucker Carlson.
I know, I know, the globless political funders and foundations and stuff that I've had a window into, they're very policy focused. It's like they fund campaigns and they fund campaigns pegged too specific policy outcomes that they want, but they really do not do. I mean, you can see it in the climate space right now, like all of all the foundations are just now kind of starting to use this word narrative change a lot, you know, and I'm like, oh my god, you guys are like fifty
years behind, you know. So anyway, it is interesting to me how all that intersects together. And I think that similarly, I don't know that you end up with masculinity backlash thing that we're seeing now in the absence of this whole information ecosystem. There's so much being done to really pull people into that. I mean, there's underlying drivers too, but I don't know that it would be so rampant and so effective about all of the disinformation tools too.
Yeah. I think specifically the balance of gender is so powerful. It's it's for many people the most core aspect of their identity. And if they feel that something like climate or any number of other so called progressive ideas is threatening that, then it's it's kind of like, uh, the most important thing that you have, you have to defend it. Yeah, that thing that is the most basic part of who I am is being taken away from me or destroyed. I can't allow that, right, right?
Do you think that any of it hards back to the really big man versus nature domination stuff too. There's this social sciences researcher that I like a lot because she focuses on media studies and communications and stuff. Melissa Aroncheck is her name. She wrote a book called A Strategic Nature, and it's about the history of environmental pr and she talks about these two approaches to quote unquote the environment in the US kind of in the early
early days of the country. She particularly ties them to two specific men, Gifford Pinchot, who is like the first forester in the US, and John Muir, who is all about conservation and creating national parks and all of this stuff, and of course neither of them is paying any attention at all to the indigenous approach to nature that existed before the US. But she talks about it as like these two kind of warring ideas about nature, one to preserve it and the other to control it and kind
of see it as an economic resource. And I feel like there's a lot of that that's like tied to the masculinity stuff too.
Yeah, I mean I think there are other psychological relationships. I mean, at this point, this is something we'll also be talking about, this idea of eco sadism that we live in a time when it's it's almost like it's funny to own the libs by destroying something or you know,
intentionally like rolling coal as an example. Yeah, things that you know, on the face of them defy logic, but when you understand, like psychologically what they kind of do for the person is kind of engaging in these practices, I wouldn't say it makes sense, but it definitely is outside the paradigm of rationality. Yeah, you're talking about with the kind of like, oh, do we kind of conserve and exploit or do we preserve nature as this kind
of untouched wilderness. Yet now it's like, well, why don't we just burn it because it's fun?
I see the burn it because it's fun stuff. Also being tied a lot to ideas of like freedom, you know.
Like exercising my sovereignty.
Yeah, yeah, totally freedom and like no rules and all of that kind of thing. All right, cool, Well I could talk to you about this stuff for hours, which is why we're doing a whole season. I'm very excited. Thank you so much, and look out for that season coming in your feeds soon