Climate Courage: reporting from the front lines in Asia

May 3rd was World Press Freedom Day and a UN report released stated 44 environmental journalists have been murdered in last 15 years. This means to report on the state of the environment has become a perilous profession, with the highest number of killings in Asia Pacific (30 cases), while Latin America and the Caribbean reported 11.

The UN report surveyed 905 journalists from 129 countries, and more than 70 per cent had been attacked, threatened or pressured, with attacks on environmental reporters and news outlets up 42% in the past five years. 

This puts us all in a dangerous situation. Accurate information on the climate crisis has never been more urgent, and yet it is up against an extraordinary surge of disinformation, as well as threats of violence. The changes in our environment are now before all our eyes, with no country spared the impacts, and this means environmental reporting is critical to help raise awareness about the urgency of our situation, to document and give voice to those most affected, and to encourage individuals, businesses, and governments to get serious about adaptation plans, and to take immediate action to reverse course before it is too late. And yet, the people trying to help all of us are facing more and more danger to do their job – it needs to stop.

To help us dig into this very important issue, we are delighted to welcome Robin Hicks, associate editor of Eco-Business, Asia Pacific’s largest media and business intelligence organisation dedicated to sustainable development and ESG performance. Robin has worked as a journalist across Asia for nearly 20 years, but he’s more than a journalist, he’s a passionate advocate for wildlife, working as a volunteer wildlife rescue officer for ACRES Singapore (Animal Concerns Research & Education Society), and has been volunteering for important conservation work since the 90s. 

Climate Courage is a livestream, held every two weeks and is co-hosted by Andrea T Edwards, Dr. David Ko and Richard Busellato. On the show, we cover critical topics across the full spectrum of the polycrisis, in everyday language, and we go big picture on the climate crisis, while also drilling down and focusing on the actions we can all take to be part of the solution. Whether individual action, community action, or national/global action - every single one of us can be part of ensuring a live-able future for our children and grandchildren. We owe them that!

Check out eco-business https://www.eco-business.com/ 

#ClimateCourage #RethinkingChoices #UncommonCourage 

To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar

Transcript

0:03

Welcome to Climate Courage. My name is Andrea Edwards. Hello. I'm David Coe. Richard? You want to Oh, thank you so much. It's looking it's yep. Yeah. You you you froze there for a bit. Alright. I hope that wasn't me. That's okay. That's okay. We can we can we can move forward. This is the second time we're here together with you, Andre. Yep. Well, it's about 4th or 5th, actually. Yeah. For Climate Courage. Yeah. And today, we are really, really happy. We've got a very special guest, Robin Hicks. And I met Robin in a former life, in Singapore many, many years ago, and he's been a journalist for more than 20 years working in the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. So he really understands what's going on the ground in this part of the world. And he's also works for a a charity called, Acres Acres. So tell me, Robin, if I got it wrong, but it's a Singapore based animal welfare charity. And according to LinkedIn, he's had some pretty interesting account encounters with snakes. So here he is. Welcome, Robin. Thanks so much for having me, Andrea. Nice to meet you, David and Richard. It's great to have you here. That sounds like a really interesting story about snakes. We're gonna have to hear it at some point. Yeah. Well, that's what I do on the weekends. It keeps me say I mean, you think I mean, Singapore's got a reputation for a boring place to live, but certainly not if you're being spat at by a spitting cobra or chasing a there's amazing wildlife here. Just a lot of it is hidden. So you get huge pythons here, for example. But you just can't see them, because they use the canals and waterways to swim around. And there usually are a couple of huge pythons lurking beneath, say, a hawker center, because there's lots of rats. But what's, I don't know, I guess difficult is the level of the biophobia, the resistance or reluctance to accept the natural world or biology as part of the city living experience. I think it's similar in other cities, like Hong Kong and other places. People just aren't used to the natural world, which is a shame in Singapore because it is, I think the BBC said it has the highest biodiversity of any city on the planet. It's just, yeah, we don't even see it. Yeah. I remember when the otters came back in Singapore, it was magical. And now they're everywhere. Right? Yeah. I mean, the the population's magical. And now they're everywhere. Right? Yeah. I mean, the the population's expanding to almost worrying degree because they get the population because the once they cleaned up the river and the waterways around Singapore, the otter population came back from Malaysia and has exploded. And now otters are expanding their populations, actually getting into fights over territory. And they keep stealing rich people's koi, which is quite amusing. They keep raiding people's koi and just going on massive killing sprits. And Wow, that's so funny. What's worrying, actually, is that at one point, they'll start to be cold. But what I think and that happens to macaques and other species in Singapore. The level of tolerance for animals or wildlife in general is low, I'd say. And once they become a problem, the government will have no hesitation in culling. Even but the things with otters, what protects them is they're extremely cute. So that factor, whereas macaque, long tail macaques aren't quite as cute. So the public aren't worried about them, getting cold. But, yeah, it'd be interesting to see as the population expands the level of tolerance for otters and how that changes. Yeah. Yeah. I used to when I rode my bike to Microsoft, I used to stop and watch the otter the first otter family, just playing around in the dirt. It was awesome. And just to be in a city and to see something so magical, you know. Australians, you know, we where I grew up, you'd see wildlife every day, kangaroos Yeah. Running across and stuff. But yeah. No. It's very cool to see it in the city. Alright. So Robin has got an hour, and that means we're gonna have to be focused. But like we like we did last time, let's start off with what's going on in the news that's really got your attention at the moment. And I'm gonna presume Antonio Guterres' announcement about fossil fuel advertising has got a few people's attention, especially yours, David. So do you wanna talk about your perspective? Yes. Yes. You know, I I actually find I was in a cinema, a few months back. I think we were watching, it was Taylor Swift's Eras tour, that was being streamed in cinemas. You got a teenage daughter. Right? And and it was, you know, the the the the, the the tour was great. But before that, they had this UN, advertisement with young children from around the world talking about how the world is all going to pot, basically. And they have these sort of really flashing red images of burning earth with, lovable young children from around the world saying, save our future, all of that in there. And the problem is the dissonance it creates is just impossible. And what you end up feeling is you're just being ramped with a message. There's no opportunity for any kind of open conversation about it. And yesterday's announcement from, Gutierrez comparing fossil fuels with tobacco is actually a really bad thing to do. There is absolutely no need for tobacco. You know, if you wanna get addicted to something, there are plenty of things you can addicted to. There's actually no need for tobacco all along the chains of production along the way. Mhmm. But fossil fuels needs a really genuine open conversations because people's lives depend on it. And we have to reduce them, but you're not going to get that conversation by just going off with some black and white message that says somehow implicitly that everyone is bad. It's just not the same thing. So the UN and Antonio Gutierrez, who's trying to forge this message forward about how we need to cut the emissions, And what we need to do, what it needs to be going forward is to say, imagine a new market where you can actually keep oil, gas, and coal in the ground. You know, go back to Taylor Swift. Right? And and I have this idea. Richard and I have this idea we were talking along and such. You know, we're having conversation with a friend of ours, Vincent. And we're thinking about how can you create a new market. It says, well, what happens if you imagine Pandora Jewelry, the biggest jewelry company in the world. When you go and buy your daughter a link, they ask you or, they ask you, do you want to take part in a lottery? If you win in the lottery, what happens is that you get to meet Taylor Swift on stage in one of her concerts. And you're gonna say, oh, how do I do? What do I do to sign up? And you say, you've already paid for it. We will take a fraction of your money, one day's worth of our revenues, and we'll commit it to keeping oil and gas and coal in the ground on your behalf. And you just need to sign here to say you want us to do this on your behalf, and you get a chance to win to be on stage with Taylor Swift. And every time you buy, you get a chance to enter again. And that's a much more imaginative way of engaging businesses, which use the oil and gas and coal, the consumers who knows there is an issue with it, in a way that says, actually, we can shape it in the way that benefits everybody rather than go around having messages that just turns us into an impossible brick wall. Yeah. I'm not sure about the the Pandora's sort of as an example because it's just more consumption, which which which that's my little red flag there with that. But, but the the brick wall and and and that point that you made right at the beginning, we need fossil fuels. Whether we like it or not, we need them. We're just using too many of them. But, Robin, you've worked in the marketing PR comm space as a journalist. So what did you think of that? Like, how do you think the the industry is gonna respond to that? Yeah. Interesting. So I'm trying to write a story on that, today, actually, trying to get the 5 big holding companies, WPP, IPG, Habas, and the other guys, to respond to Guterres, what he said, at least come up with the position on it. And they've been very quiet. And I think, I think we all know why, right? They, they will, will not until they're legally bound to, until I asked an NGO in Australia about it. Australians are good on this sort of thing. And, yeah. So so so what's gonna push the big advertising majors away from fossil fuels? What will make them? What persuade them to drop fossil fuels clients, if anything? And it will be regulation. It's not until it's legally, it's legally mandated that you can't advertise fossil fuels. They'll stop working with them. But at the moment, only one of the big groups, IPG, which I think works for Exxon and a few markets, has said that, oh, they've come up with at least the rules of engagement for working with fossil fuels clients. They said that, oh, yeah. We won't take on new fossil fuels clients. We're only using the existing ones. And we'll work on a time bound plan to phase out fossil fuels exposure over the longer term. But, yeah, meanwhile, what's interesting is you've seen in Australia and in the US especially, you've got these interesting NGO groups as Clean Creatives and Comms Declare for Climate, which are trying to galvanize the advertising industry to make a pledge to stop working fossil fuels clients, which I think is really interesting. But, yeah, the I mean, the it's the legacy, though, isn't it, of of how they advertise their products and services that is so pernicious. Right? I mean, they're the greenwashing masters. Ever since Oh. 99 BP British Petroleum pretty much invented greenwashing, didn't it? In 1999, it came up with a campaign it rebranded from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum. It changed its logo from a strong shield into a sunflower. And Greenpeace came out and said, look, guys, you've spent more on rebranding through through WPP, I think it was, than you invest in fossil fuels, which is pretty much classic greenwashing. So so, yeah, it's just the legacy of misinformation and diversion that the advertising agencies have done on behalf of fossil fuels clients that I think that United Nations has a problem with, and I think everyone should have a problem with. Yeah. So I suppose for me, when I heard it, it's sort of similar to what David's saying. I just did look. If if we're gonna do it so Edinburgh of Scotland, I think it was Edinburgh, announced that you can't advertise fossil fuels, the cruise industry. I think, planes were included. There are a couple of other industries, and, of course, there's been attacks about the city being woke. But to me, like, if we really wanna address the scale of the issue that we face, and that's the the thing we're not doing, the scale, anything with fast in it, fast food, fast fashion, fast furniture, shouldn't be allowed to be advertising. So put IKEA in the mix of that. Obviously, Cheyenne, Timu, all those nasty companies. I was just reading today in Bangladesh the the because of the garment industry, which is such a major, contributor to the GDP, and it basically brought the country out of poverty. And it's just basically polluted the entire environment with forever chemicals, so that's a priority. So to me, it's just it's just it didn't go far enough. And if we wanna reduce fossil fuels, we need to reduce the need for fossil fuels, and that's our clothes, how we eat, how we drive, how we how we move. It's it's all of it. So I suppose for me, they didn't go far enough. But then from an advertising marketing PR perspective, you know, they're sitting there looking at their business models, and I that's my background. Right? And they need a diversity of clients and to keep people employed, and the biggest playing biggest paying clients are the are the ones who are doing the biggest harm on the on the planet. So what's their business model moving forward when they're basically being told not just for fossil fuels but for all of it? Like, how do they move forward as an industry? So it to me, it's a real it's it's actually a very complicated topic, but it's it's a beginning of a conversation, I think. So I suppose that's in one way a good thing, and it's getting lots of attention. Richard, what are you sorry. Sorry. Go wrong. I would definitely wholeheartedly concur with your past sentence, which is it's a starting point. I I I don't like the tone on what Gutierrez emphasized because I don't think gonna win the battle by vilifying the opposition or whatever we wanna call the fossil fuel producers. And the aspect that we all touched upon here is, like, if if we shut it down completely tomorrow, you would have revolution and chaos in every country. You would have civil war because nothing in our structure of the economy works without fossil fuels. But, you know, my favorite quote on our addiction, if you like, and consumption of them is the interview they had many years ago with Mick Jagger about the sixties and the drug taking and why Brian Jones fell off the wagon and drowned in his poop. He said it was the sixties. Everyone was using drugs. Brian was just using too much. And I think that's how we need to see the fossil fuel. You know, we're not gonna be able to shut it down. We just need to use less and be sensible about it. And here, ultimately, these are individual choices we make. We cannot escape the responsibility from our own decision making and what we decide to put our dollar towards. Do we want to drive to the gym, or do you wanna take a bike to the gym? I think, you know, but the the thing that comes out in in many respects out of out of this is that when you when you when you're trying to come out, and I think the UN is particularly bad at this sort of piece of communications, you you can't have it be something that turns into a meme so that you're ridiculed by the way you you cannot do it. It. And the the angrier Antonio Guterres becomes, the more he becomes meme like. And his message is totally lost. And and he's just playing into how, if I were a fossil fuel lobby, would want my opposition to play. Don't attack the actual use of the thing. Don't attack the actual exploration extraction. Attack all the superficial stuff so that it just becomes something that focus people away attention away from the fact they are the ones behind why we burn 100 over a 102,000,000 barrels of oil every day. Don't raise that part. Focus it so that you become meme like. Yeah. I I I'm a big fan of Antonio Guterres, and, I think he has the best one liners, so he's obviously got a good script writer. But, I think he's heading an organization that is designed to fail, and he's using everything he's got in his arsenal to help it succeed. And I I'm seeing a lot of criticism for the UN and the body and and its uselessness in the world, but I I I'm we don't want we don't wanna lose this body. I think we need this body, and we need to we need to get behind it and help them be successful because it's designed to fail. But before we bring up this point out, Brahma, what do you think listening to all these different things? Just to add to that, yeah, I think I agree with you, Anja. I love it's very quotable as a journalist. Do you know what I mean? It's like, oh, I'm walking again. It's sad to say something you can use in a headline, right? But also, I do remember showing the age a bit. But going back 20 years, I remember the UN trying to engage with the advertising industry 20 years ago. And their framing was a lot softer. They were trying to look, look, we're not disrupting your business model. We're not suggesting that you move away from carbon intensive industries. But can you frame it differently? Can I think the headline that they use with, can sustainability sell? So can you continue to do what you do but just sell different stuff? Which I think is a different way of approaching it than, obviously, now, where Gutierrez has gone pretty gung ho and basically calling them out for being corporate corporate evildoers. So but but, yeah, I think I think he sounds like a man who's he's had enough of playing nice guy. And UN, by the way, also have been a cat it's a cat advertising vessel in a couple of weeks, isn't it? You know, the annual shindig for the advertising industry. UN's been there every year. They've always had some sort of booth, some sort of presence. And it just feels like they're ratcheting up their pressure on the industry to do something. Because the advertising industry does feel like a legacy industry that's going to change even after the fossil fuels industry will change. They'll be the because there are services industry that's sort of slaves to clients. And I I do get the sense, I know you think, that that that marketing industry will be the la one of the last sectors to to pivot to to cleaner energy or less carbon intensive industries. That's why he's taken the the tone that he has. Yeah. Yeah. I think the difference is it's a it's a young industry, typically. And, you know, the I think the drive will come from the younger employees saying we don't wanna do this anymore. Well, I remember when I ran a team, they they were constantly saying, well, Andrew, we don't really wanna work for a company like this. We don't believe in their values. And I'm like, yeah, neither do I. We're not gonna pitch for it. You know? But that was unusual. And, I think I lost a job because I wasn't willing to pitch for business that I didn't think had integrity. But, that wasn't common, but I think it's become hopefully more common. But the other story that's really capturing my attention is the heat waves. Of course, in Asia, we went through 3 months, and I can't tell you the relief when that was over. Is it cooled down in Singapore yet, Robin, or is it still that intense humidity? It's still pretty boiling. Yeah. Is it? Sort of see I've always said there isn't that much variation. But yeah. It's yeah. The the edge the sting has come out of it slightly. Yeah. Right. So the last few weeks here, it's just been it's just been cool. It's been raining. It's the life's coming back. It's been a real relief. But, of course, we watched what was happening in the US and Pakistan, and I was frustrated by the media attention on that. Because until we started to really get a sense of scale of deaths, the the the global media weren't paying attention, but we got lots of information out of Mexico when the hella monkeys were dying. But what's interesting about what's happening now with this heat dome is it's moving into America. And because it's been cool before, what so, alright, basically, my the people in in the northern hemisphere, if they went through the heat extreme that has just gone through this region, which hasn't finished yet, it would be deadly because the people in this region can cope with so much more heat to an extent. Right? But what's happening now as it moves in, there's a a a mega rally in, Arizona where 11 there were 11 heat strokes, patients that had gone to hospital. I don't think anyone's died yet, but, we're starting to see a rapid, surge of heat, but also big numbers of people, passing out due to heat stroke. Deaths are starting to be reported because they haven't acclimatized at all. They've gone from cold to hot. And so I think in the coming weeks, we're gonna see some pretty extreme, suffering in in the United States, especially because all of the we talked about it last time, electricity shortages because of storms that have hit in the past. So if regions are hit and they haven't got electricity and they can't get cool, they're gonna be in trouble. It doesn't sound like they're prepared. There's 2 overnight cooling stations in Phoenix. 2. There were 680, 668, or something like that. People last year, may mainly the homeless, no one cares. So, you know, the reporting of heat, the number of deaths being reported, I think we're gonna hear that thousands and thousands and thousands of people have died across India and Pakistan, maybe in 12 months' time when the next heat wave hits. But I think we're really gonna be starting moving into that territory of mass deaths from from heat. And I don't see it cooling down just because the linear is coming in. I think it's gonna keep going. So you you all paying attention to the heat extremes? Yeah. You know, I I again, in in that sort of softer angle, I think it's actually is actually can be really effective. So I called out my home insurance, and it was because these cracks were appearing on the rendering of my house, and they've been dry and so on, wondering if I got subsidence and stuff. And it's because, you know, just the heat, thermal expansion, and then you get a cold winter and bit of weathering and stuff. And you the repairs that you need on your houses and places you live just increase your costs, and that just adds to your costs. So the problems in this way is actually, it's terrible people living under heat and I feel for them, but I'm paying the cost in my own house in where I am without even being under those extremes in that way. And the reporting just doesn't actually touch on what the consequences to our everyday lives are in the way that, actually, you know, I end up calling my my insurer about it and having to pay the costs associated with getting it done and then sorting it back out. Those are the ways in which the climate disruptions get into everybody's lives. And and I think that's really important as a part part of that reporting, that the reporting isn't focused on the extremes because people pull away from the extremes. It makes them kind of that. That's too much. I can't cope with it. I'm not gonna read that now. Yep. There's a bill I have to pay, and whatever happens, I have to pay it. Yep. Yep. Robin, what are you saying? Yeah. So, my publication, Eco Business. So we've done quite a lot of reporting around heat, mainly in Southeast Asia. And there's been a lot of talk about heat literacy and heat stress. And also preparedness, you mentioned that, Anja, that we did a story on how poorly prepared a lot of Southeast Asian cities are for extreme heat. In the context of Singapore, the universities have done some interesting studies on heat stress and the impact of extreme heat on the human body, everything from reduced fertility in men to lack of concentration, construction people, the poor devils that actually work outside and actually are exposed to it. That's the reality in Singapore. It's, I guess, pretty interesting that the elites are inside pretty much protected by air conditioning. It's the people building the city that are exposed to it, plus gig workers that ferry around deliveries. People can fall off buildings in this heat while they're constructing the city. So there's been a lot of reporting on that, which I think has been pretty responsible and interesting. In a Singapore context, what's frustrated me is a lack we'll probably get onto this later, but, not really seeing the bigger picture on extreme heat. One is a pet issue that's pretty close to my heart, as I mentioned, the work I do around wildlife rescue is forest loss here. Not many people talk about it because this is a small island, but Singapore's still losing a lot of forest at a rapid rate. As we know, forests keep places cool. And losing secondary forest no one cares about secondary forests forests here because they're not nature reserves. And they're seen as in between lands that will soon be developed. But there's been no study, serious studies, that connects forest loss with heat. I think that's a lot of work that needs to be done, especially in urban areas. So, yeah. It's been pretty scary. And Singapore's, as mentioned, hot all year round. But it's been pretty crazily intense. And yeah, as I mentioned earlier on, it's an interesting segment on Channel News Asia last week where a climate scientist was talking about the extreme heat in Singapore. And he was flanked by 2 news readers that are talking about La Nina effect. And wasn't it great that La Nina was going to sweep through and cool us down? And Professor Benjamin Horton, I think he won't be ashamed to admit. He got quite hot under the color, if you pardoned upon. He got quite angry, visibly angry, that the message just was not sinking in among these news anchors, that the problem was human induced climate change. And La Nina was not going to cool Singapore down in any permanent way. It was just a temporary weather phenomenon. So that sort of that that interesting dynamic in the news of between what's immediately in front of us, what we're experiencing now with the background trends, I think, is something that a lot of news organizations struggle to to deal with or or or storytell well. Yeah. Yeah. I I I my frustration so, like, last year, I spent I don't know how much time. I was tracking all of the heat waves across the world, looking at it all I was doing when when when do electricity grids fall over? What temperature? So basically from about 48, 49 degrees up, that's when they fall over, and the majority of electricity in Asia is above the ground. Right? So it's even more more in danger of collapsing. When do, generators fall? And, you know, in Africa, that's a a a really important source of energy. Well, they start getting sluggish sluggish around 40 degrees Celsius. So how are the people in Africa gonna survive if their only energy source can't work, you know? And there's so many simple things to do, you know. We drove from Phuket up to Bangkok last summer and back, and I I was just looking for a white roof. Just one. You know? Somebody who went, I I need to get prepared for this. I didn't see a single thing. And the construction workers, you know, in Singapore, they live in luxury by comparison. You know, it's tin literally tin shacks and dirt roads, you know, and those poor people have gone through so much in the last few months. And next year, it's gonna be hotter, maybe as hot with the linear impact, maybe maybe hotter. But we don't know. And so that Earth energy imbalance argument that Hanson's sort of talking a lot about. Right? But it's gonna get hotter, and we need to get ready. It doesn't all have to cost a lot of money. There's a lot of things people can do. Vegetation's a huge part of the solution. Singapore, University has done a recent study on painting surfaces white, and it was a significant drop of temperature. You know? So there's there's some interesting but we're not doing it, and it's here. It's now, you know, in that long term view, that big picture view. Where is it? It's just Yeah. In the area. It's kind of puzzling. Can I ask, Robin, just kind of, out of curiosity, you know, when you were talking about, Benjamin Houghton speaking, Benjamin Horton speaking with the TV anchors or the journalists about that? You know, what I want to ask is how much do you think that, how much are the journalists capable in terms of, you know, the resources they have, what time they have, and so on, to be able to inform themselves before they actually have to appear and then interview someone or do do those things. Is is that something which, you know Yeah. Yes. Yes. It's a good point. I think most a bit of a generalization. Most gen journalists, if you're any good, can go from a position of relative ignorance. And with some research and talking to the right experts, can knock out a story. Right? But with something as complicated as climate science, I think you really do need to have, an expert on the show to explain what's happening. Now Channel News Asia, before Benjamin Houghton came on, they've got a pretty detailed segment that explained the the weather phenomenon, what was happening. But what they didn't have is that additional bigger picture layer, which explains human induced climate change, which is a phrase that Ben kept saying repeatedly. As mentioned, it was like he almost had like a tick. He just kept hacking to repeat himself and came across as a scientist that really wasn't sad. He wasn't being listened to or wasn't being taken seriously. But, yeah, to I I think they had a a decent level of understanding, but they just weren't joining the dots Yeah. And saying, yeah, this landing is not great because it's not gonna temporarily it's not gonna, cool us down for for much longer. We're gonna return to this background, reality of of of permanently hotter weather. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So should we move into the because I I know that we could talk about the news all day, but, let's focus on Robin. So we're gonna go back to the beginning. You know, you've been a journalist for 20 years. So just a quick, view of what drew you into the profession, but most specifically, I'm I'm really curious to hear how it's been since you've moved into sustainability. And I I suppose there's a couple of key areas I'd love to hear. Do you feel like by taking on this role, you're making a contribution? What are your hard days like? How do you keep your mind under control? And and for anyone who thinks I'm overwhelming him with questions, I've given him to him in in advance so he knows what I'm gonna ask. But would you encourage others to join the profession, especially right now at this point in time? So give give us that take. Yeah. So just I guess, yeah, start from the beginning. Degree in zoology. Like, I I really am a I everyone says this is insustainability, but I am a genuine tree hugger. You know, I initially wanted to be a vet, but I think that's clever enough. It seemed like a lot of. And and but I did I did a degree in zoology, University of Bristol, and I went on a conservation trip to the Philippines. It was a diving expedition, surveying coral reefs. It was, it was, it was wonderful. But I got pretty addicted to journaling about the experience. And that act of sort of writing stuff down and putting it down on paper, just I don't know why. I just it just really appealed to me. And I went back after that and tried to get a job in journalism. It took me a year. It took me a long time to persuade an editor to take a gamble on some kid with a zoology degree. It's not exactly the most obviously transferable of skills from science into, journalism, unless it's a specialist scientific field. But eventually, an editor took a gamble on me at a publication called Media and Marketing Europe. And from then, I got sort of, as a lot of journalists do, get sort of pigeonholed into a certain category that you write about. So that was, you know, 10, 15 years. I was writing about media and marketing until a job ad came up. Actually from, it's actually a friend's that posted the, the ads. I actually knew of her. Jessica Chung, who's, who's still my boss, 8 years later. And I was friends with, husband at the time as well. And so I guess I was lucky that, I interviewed for it with a, with a friends. And so I guess it was less of a gamble because she sort of knew what I was like. But yeah, no, it took me a while. As I said, it took me a long time to, to get into journalism, but since of being there, I could do, I could do and would not want to do anything else. So, yeah, it's, yeah, it's been 20 plus years, so, yeah. So, so does it feel like I'm making contribution? Definitely not all of the time. Sometimes. I mean, there's certain issues that I think myself, my colleagues have made a difference on even even incrementally stuff like we put quite a lot of pressure on Singapore's big three banks to think seriously about coal and draw up conditions, pledges to step away from coal. We work with NGOs, put out some stories. And I do think we make a genuine difference to China move at Southeast Asia's biggest three banks away from coal. So that's that's a story or bunch of stories, I think, that had had a genuine impact. I do something of a sport, right. But I do really enjoy writing about greenwashing and expose it. I think any journalist does. It's fun. Right? Calling companies out for wrongdoing is is just a lot of fun, especially if they're banks are right and you can prove that what they're saying does not match with what they're doing, which I think is a huge issue in sustainability at the moment. Those stories are fun. And I do know that they've made an impact, but some I've also been called out myself for being too critical and damaging the confidence of sustainability teams. They're just like, well, forget it. We're not doing anything. Are we going to at least not communicate what we're doing? Cause we don't want to be slammed for it. Right. I think that's a genuine issue, at how critical you are and how much leeway potentially give and how much you celebrate the wins of a company that's actually achieved something. Right? So yeah. See, I think that's an issue that that that's important to raise that in journalism, there was a lot of negativity, especially in this sector. I think a lot of journalists do always tend to focus on the negative. Rhett, the founder of Rhett Butler, the founder of Mongo Bay. It's the world's biggest environmental website. He said that if you give a journalist a solution to write about, they'll always write about the 10% that doesn't work. It's just in their nature. And I I agree with that. But, you know, there are positive news stories about that that are not and I'm sure you guys probably all agree, are not being reported on enough. I mean, just today, just off the top of my head, an area, a forest twice the size of Hong Kong was legally recognized as belonging to indigenous peoples in Papua. Right? It's a just a great story, especially just seeing the seeing the change of government in Indonesia. Everyone's scared of Bobo Sipudianto, a former military general. And also another story that definitely hasn't been in the news is Southeast Asia's biggest ride hailing app has just seen a drop in, emissions, which sound like a small ish story, but to to even start decarbonizing in a region like Southeast Asia, which is more bound to fossil fuels than almost any region in the world, I think is is interesting and worth celebrating. Also, which has been in the news a lot more but is good news is the is a ban on the dog meat trade, which seems to be moving around Asia. And, again, I think that's probably picked up a bit more traction because dogs are cute and cuddly. Yeah. So, yeah, there is good news out there, but it's definitely not given as much airtime as it should be, perhaps. And and with us journalists are definitely guilty of that. What are the hard days like? Depressing. I suffer from depression anyway. I have a number of years and writing about emptying oceans and empty and forests does does actually that process of writing about it does help you distance yourself from it. It's a sort of cathartic process that does seem to make things a bit easier. But some stories are just like, Jesus. It's just it it does get too much on occasion. Yeah. It's really hard to bear. And that depression does turn to anger. A lot of stories, I'm sure that you guys feel the same, just make me really, really angry. One is corporate lobbying. There's something about a company trying to, like, for example, not picking on any name or any company in particular, but Coca Cola. They they I've got a a rap sheet, a formula of blocking, laws, which will make them pay for the pollution they create. That that makes me extremely angry, and not trust or want to buy drink Coca Cola. I mean, just stuff like that. This makes me really and also companies like Shell rolling black climate targets, and they knew about climate change for years, and and they're weakening already pretty unambitious climate targets that makes me angry. But also the other area topics that we cover that make me conflicted. One is deep sea mining. We need to have 10 times more transition minerals that are currently in end in circulation. But do we dig up the ocean floor to get them? I mean, does sound like an extremely bad idea, But it's a trade off that most sustainability stories, there is this sort of trade off. And we have to make up, in our minds, say, with fossil fuels. Right? We need them, but we also don't want too many of them. So, yeah. That's that that, conflicted angle to it. How do I manage my mind doing this work? Some months, it's yoga, meditation, and swimming. Other months, it's booze. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I don't care what he says. I mean, I've I've probably got quite an unhealthy relationship with with alcohol. But, I've met many people in my situation that are quite similar. I went out for drinks with a chief sustainability officer of big Malaysian bank recently and asked her how, so how do you deal with, you know, burnout? You know, I'm sure you've seen the cases in as a story you did recently about the job of the CSO, the chief sustainability officer. Right? It's just broadening, and diversifying so quickly that these people cannot cope. They are breaking down, and they're leaving this this very, very important job. And she's asked how you cope with it. And she said, alcohol. That's a coping mechanism. Right? Plus, I tend to channel this, I guess, angst, frustration, rage in into productivity. Could be a touch of ADHD as well undiagnosed. I do I do tend to go out on 10, which is possibly unhealthy amount. I do work a lot, possibly too much. But do you see work as medicine as well? Like, churning, knocking out a story that you're sort of proud of is a way of dealing with climate anxiety for for for for sure. And, yeah, I mean, that sort of leads on to the last point you question you made about, would I encourage younger writers to join the profession? Without question. I mean, you don't do it for the money. That's for sure. I mean, it's not really a brag, but I've never really asked for a pay rise. Unlucky to have any job at all in journalism. You know, it's the structural changes that the business is going through that we can sure talk about later. You know, Google and Facebook is eaten advertising revenue. A lot of publications, good publications have had to scramble around for different ways to make money. But still, even then, it is a wonderful job. And the satisfaction of putting out a story that holds a company to account or tells an untold story that you think needs to be told is it's a wonderful feeling. Yeah. It was I'd recommend it to to to anyone. Nice. I think it's a it's a wonderful career choice and, you know, with hindsight, you know, and a bit more encouragement. Who knows if I gone gone down that route? Because I think it's it's one of those things that, aligns very much to enable you to do something you care about deeply and you're genuinely interested in. And I actually think when I'm looking at youngsters, I got 2 of them in the twenties. One of them is definitely working in an area that interests her. The other one, yeah, kind of. You know, it's not bad, but it's not really what I'm passionate about. But if I look at all their friends without exception, one, who is the doctor, no one is really working with what's interesting them. And I find that quite depressing. I was fortunate. I I'm really interesting in economics and, you know, finance and trading. So I set out my stall early on, and I'm grateful for that, that I was able to do 30 plus years in the field that genuinely interest me. But I am worried about youngsters that kind of have completely different perspective on what the career should look like. Because if you're not enable to go into field that at least you have some interest in. You know, you don't you don't need to love it every second of the day. I actually don't think you're gonna have a very happy life. And it's very hard. It's boring. Yeah. Because you spend, you know, a lot of time with your work. Yeah. As we all know. Well, I I was going to ask Robin. You know, it's great you end up in this very positive kind of budding journalist. It's a great thing to do. There is, unfortunately, the other side where increasingly, you know, journalism is kind of quite quite a threatening occupation. It sort of needs a a danger pay kind of thing with it. I think there was a report early in the month early last month on on World Press Freedom Day about how environmental journalists and journalists of all kinds are being being killed around the world. What what kind of experience, have you seen yourself of that? Is that something that you you you face? And, you know, what are the people or the industries and so on that are actually behind, this kind of shift? Yeah. So so, I mean, I'll talk about Singapore in a minute, where where I'm based. But, yeah, that report, I think and poor old Philip the Philippines always gets labeled, I mean, because it is the most it's one of Asia's freest countries for the press. You can feel free to criticize whoever you like. But you may well get shot for it. There's been there have been an alarm, a consistently alarming number of killings of journalists in the Philippines over the years and environmental defenders, which are helping to tell the stories about mainly in the resources sector, so in mining. And a lot of that's being driven, by the way, by the drive for renewables. We need the transition minerals to put in wind turbines and solar panels and car batteries, including nickel. Nickel, for example. I mean, most half of Indonesia seems to be dug up at the moment by mining companies. Philippines, it's particularly dangerous, I think, because you've got this idea of red flagging. It's called red flagging over there, where journalists are labeled terrorists and can be persecuted that way. There's a lot of going after journalists online as well, that there are a lot of pay higher trolling, apparently, according to human rights groups I've spoken to about, the Philippines, that if for any sort of anti mining sentiment, trolls will come out and produce a party line, and then systematically persecute whoever's criticizing mining as a pursuit and activity. So, yeah, the Philippines is full of a lot of incredibly brave journalists, I think. I think in some countries, especially I mean, I say Vietnam, especially. Vietnam is a very, very difficult place to be a journalist at the moment. A lot of NGOs, climate NGOs, are being locked up for being outspoken about the government's policy on coal, for example. And being a journalist in Vietnam is nigh on impossible if you don't have government approval, and and very difficult. So So here in Singapore, I think it's also very difficult. It does not have a free if the Report Without Borders press freedom index, that's one of the metrics for gauging freedom of the press. It's pretty much down there in the 150, something like that. I mean, none of Southeast Asia does well. But the Philippines does okay. I think Thailand is the freest, unless you go talking about the king. And then it's as dangerous as it is. So Singapore is interesting. A journalist I think I have an enormous amount of respect for a journalist called Kirsten Han, who's a fearless reporter about human rights, especially the death penalty. And she has been tremendously brave. But even she will admit that she sells sensors. I think newsrooms in Singapore, especially for mainstream media, they do not, go after establishments. So, I mean, I think it's unfair to say that, say, The Straits Times just publishes government press releases. I think there is more nuance to that. And there's a lot of good journalists there. It's the editors that will heavily edit their copy. If there's any criticism of the government, especially, obviously, also government linked institutions that are holy cows for Singapore, for example, Temasek, which owns have its tentacles everywhere there. I don't think any journalist would be allowed to go after, Tamarsec, in any shape or form, to be honest. But even then, what's even more of a serious issue is self censorship. So I I think, culturally, in in newsrooms in Singapore, there's a lot of journalists that instinctively hold back in their criticism of environmental crime or or would never it could be unfair. It could be a bit of a generalization. But I don't think many journalists in Singapore would instinctively criticize, for example, openly, the government for being too lax in its climate targets, for example. There is an obvious there aren't killings or whatever than there are in Philippines, or jailings that are in Vietnam. But I do think there's definitely a culture of fear in newsrooms in Singapore that keeps journalists automatically in check, without. But that's not to say I mean, for example, I've written a few stories recently that are critical of the Singapore government in a number of ways. And they may seem like quite soft stories. But there's a huge incineration plan that got delayed. Again, this is a story that wouldn't appear in the mainstream press but just wouldn't report on something negative necessarily happening, I don't think. Also a story about Coca Cola and a consortium of other packaged goods companies deliberately delaying polluter pays law in Singapore. So I was quite nervous about putting the story out. But the thing about it was, it didn't make the government look bad. They did not lose face, which is the worst possible thing that I think you could do journalists could do in Singapore is the government to lose space, because you will hear about it. But this story and what's important to do is that, obviously, the right to reply from the government is featured very high up in the story. I think that their argument is prominent in a story. I think that's just the license to do business in journalism here. You have to get if you're critical of the powers that be, you have to you would never run a story without, them commenting first, unless you're asking for trouble, for sure. And as a story, I was really excited about, actually, that I got from a very good source about Singapore considering introducing it's called solar radiation management, so so injecting lots of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to I got it from a pretty good source, but the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment denied it. They said, this is not happening. And so I'm not sure what I could do with this story. They've said it. They've denied it. So it's probably unlikely that I'll run the story. So that's just an example of how to, I guess, play the game in Singapore. Right? You have to be careful. But that's not to say that you cannot get stories out that are critical of important people and institutions as long as they're as long as they're balanced. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey. What's your what's your status? So UPR citizen? West Pass West Pass. Right. So one of obviously, even in Thailand, so we're on guardian visas for our boys to go to school. But if I actively criticize the country, the people do something, or especially if I criticize the royal family, we'll we'll we'll be booted out. And that's that's common knowledge. Right? So, I think, you know, we've just done the the the two questions there that I had the next one for you, Richard. I think we've covered them, but there there is a risk. But I think it's also another when you read the news that comes out of this region, I think it's really important to put the lens on top of that news that there is a subtlety to it. You know? And I I think all all news should be looked through with different lenses based on where it's coming from and, you know, whether it's far right, far left, you know, whatever. Every every every media deserves a lens, but in Asia, it's a different kind of lens. It's it's a it's a lens of subtlety. And I don't think, countries like America are very good at seeing that, you know, the subtlety that exists in this region. Because the the truth is there if you look if you look for it. Right? Absolutely. So I'll just pick on that. Yeah. You're absolutely right that say, Singaporeans know how to read the the straight times. And that is really in the lines. The story is not in the headline or the the the first 3 or 4 paragraphs. It's usually right at the bottom. The the journalist is not to bury, or the editor's like, put that further bit down a bit. Yeah. But, yeah, there are certain there are certain issues. I know 2 journalists that friends that have been kicked out of Singapore. One, a very good journalist for The Economist who wrote about sand, which is extremely sensitive issue because of where Singapore is the world's biggest sand importer because it's reclaiming land, etcetera. But, yeah, they they where sand is sourced from is from very environmentally sensitive areas, Cambodia, for example. So that didn't go down well. And another friend was booted out for writing about human rights. She referenced a it was just a reference that she added to a story that was critical from Harvard Business Review as critical of Singaporean human rights and foreign workers. So they just but the government's very honest with her and said, this is what you've written. We don't like it, and your work pass is no longer valid. So you have to leave. So yeah. I mean, I I do do really appreciate that transparency that they they were quite upfront about what she'd written about, same with, the sound article and why it was not acceptable before they were shown the door. Yeah. Yeah. That's they're both both very interesting topics. So, look, we haven't got much time, and I know I I know you're you're gonna have to jump jump off. So we could what what do you guys wanna finish with? We've got a few more minutes because I think it's, yeah, I There's people sitting on the other side of the world. You might have a a different sort of view that might be interesting. I think it it's a great opportunity when when Robin is here to to to use his experience and knowledge in the field, you know, because it's it's a fascinating area. One thing that has struck me, and I actually prepared a bit for this show is Singapore is an interesting case, which is very far down in press freedom. And, you know, for the record, I think press freedom is absolutely essential. Enable to express opinions without fear of being clamped down on. And for me, the biggest argument why that is a good thing for everyone, you know, with reasonable understanding of financial, performance. Look at the list of press freedom, Singapore being the exception, and look which stock markets have performed best over the last 30, 50, 70 years. If you don't have press freedom, you could argue you're gonna struggle to have a well functioning economy and get actually performance. Because all the countries that have had absolutely terrible performance, they're at the bottom. Singapore's performance has actually been pretty good. And it's like 25th or something over the last 50 years in terms of the and it's like 25th or something over the last 50 years in terms of so it's a little bit and I think what you're telling me is also it's a different kind of game. It isn't explicit censorship. Because you look at the countries with censorship, you're not gonna have a functioning economy and you're not gonna have a functioning stock market. So why do you wanna be poorer? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's yeah. It's like the fight for equality. Everyone wins. Yeah. You know, that's a that's a really interesting perspective because so I I think I was gonna add to something. The way that the media works in this region because of the government sort of level of control, does it also mean that there's less misinformation, disinformation, fake news because there's more control? What so I think for both sides, that's kind of interesting. Economies work better if you've got more freedom, which does that play out? I mean, if you look at the last 10 years, the countries with the most freedom, when the most extreme sort of division in media sort of erupted, you see the right side of the media versus the left, and the right's so much bigger. Is the economy supporting that argument still? I don't know. What do you think, Robin? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting one. The context of the environment. So someone said the other day that that in the medium, in many countries, there aren't many spin doctors for the environment, but there are plenty for business and establishments, right, with governments. I think that's true in many countries. So it's difficult to find that that balance. Forgive me if I'm not touched on the point you raised at all. But, yeah. And also, look at Indonesia. Indonesia is an interesting one, super important. Southeast Asia's biggest, most important economy. Their their media is relatively free. And I'd say, I mean, journalists do get into trouble. There's one journalist, Phil Jacobson, got arrested just by attending an indigenous people's meeting last year. But but, generally, I think the media there have done a really good job of calling out some of the ridiculous things that their politicians say around climate and and forests, and have done a pretty good job for it. So, I mean, politicians the the palm oil lobby is very strong in Indonesia, as we know. Right? The politicians have made some crazy arguments that a hectare of palm oil plantation is at least as good as a rainforest at locking in carbon, for example. This rhetoric that comes out of the palm oil producing nations is quite crazy. I think Indonesia media has done a better job of calling it out than the Malaysian media, for example. But, yeah, sorry if that didn't touch on your question at all. What what was your question again? I was kinda 2 things. It was freedom of press equals better economies. That's top markets. Yeah. And is the lack of freedom of press, gonna does it does it handle the disinformation and misinformation wars? So the government's better off here at at dealing with that than other parts of the world. Yeah. No. I I think that no. Absolutely. I mean, low press freedom meet lower press freedom means that the nonsense that comes out of institutions, like, for example, in Vietnam, for example, it just goes unchallenged by the media. That's the danger, right, is that if the Vietnamese government says coal is good, we need more coal, it's the economy. There's no way that any of the state owned press will challenge any of that or any of the nuance in that statement. So disinformation I always say going back to Singapore, by the way, on the topic of greenwashing. Greenwashing for me, I mean, Singapore is an absolute playground for greenwashing for a number of reasons. You've got a fairly muzzled mainstream media that does not call out companies. The government is very pro business here. And NGOs are very weak, stroke, nonexistent. So you've got companies here who basically have a free rein to communicate whatever they like with impunity, which I think is extremely dangerous. You've got companies that are making ridiculous claims that, for example, would be illegal in Europe. So Grab, the biggest ride hailing app, claiming that it will be making a claim that will be carbon neutral by 2,040. They will not say, on on how much of that target is based on carbon offsets. The carbon offsets they used have been widely debunked by Greenpeace and other other institutions. But, yeah, you just don't see it challenged. You do not see what they're saying challenged, in the press enough. So, yeah, I do I do think it's a it's a huge issue that disinformation is is not called out when there's, an unfree press. Well, if you if you wanna see someone calling out, disinformation with, elegance, I would suggest following Robin on LinkedIn. You're really good at it. You you shared something on from Reuters yesterday sponsored by ABN AMRO about, the Ketera's comment. I thought that was very clever. But, yeah, you you usually entertain me. But I know I know you need to head off. So, just wanna say thanks so much for joining us, and, keep up the good fight. We need to be supporting journalists. I think too many journalists are being attacked when the reality is the journalists are doing a great job. It's the publishers who we should be focusing, not not the people on the front lines doing the work because there's great risk in the profession. And, we need we need people who are capable of calling truth to power. Right? Yeah. Yeah. If you get absence of proper investigative journalism, all you're left with is basically opinions and absent substantial claims and for a better word, you know, cheerleaders, because you cannot actually support factually what you are out there propagating. And I think it's an extremely dangerous world. And I think what you described with sort of Facebook and Google leading into advertising space, you know, if you run the paper, of course, you're somewhat sensible about who you're gonna publish if one of the companies that you're writing an article about is your main contributor in terms of advertising revenue. However, without that revenue, you will not have investigative journalism because, you know, it costs to keep journalists going. And we, as a society, needs to start thinking about what we're actually paying for. If all we've ready to pay for is opinions, you will not have facts to be able to even sustain those debates or sustain a show like this, but we are expressing opinions. Because, you know, we need the facts, and the people are gonna honor those facts. They need to be paid for the job they do. And I think that's worth thinking about in a broader societal context. I I'd like to sort of, you know, ask throw out questions before you leave to to to put it out there, which I think is actually a an important one, which is for the reader, you know, for for the audience you you you write to. And not just yourself but other people along. You know, how do they how how should they what should they think about or how should they go about thinking whether the piece they've written is a cheerleading piece or is actually something that's that's something more than that or otherwise. You know, you you As a as a as a journalist, you mean? Or is it just anyone writing what As a reader, you know, you as a journalist, what would you what would you suggest to the reader in terms of, you you know, maybe questions they can ask themselves after they've read a piece or whatever it is so that they can be better understand whether they've actually read as a cheerleading piece or whether it's actually is a helpful investigative journalist piece. Yeah. That's a really good point. I think and I was talking to a couple of journalists before the show, actually. And they do I mean, there's one thing that there's a lot of, I guess, sloppy journalism out there. To Rich's point, you have to good journalism has to be paid for. Investecative journalism is very, very expensive. And with shrinking advertising revenues, there's dwindling sources to pay for good journalism. Right? There's some foundations out there that pay for investigative stories. But they're certainly not in the mainstream. So yeah, I think news literacy and how to discern what's a good story and what is a factually accurate story is really important. But I think there's a lot of newsreaders that are quite lazy. I mean, the the consumption of news, as we know, is pretty much falling off a cliff as it is as people pivot to social media, Instagram, TikTok, and and and that sort of thing. But but, yeah, I I do think there's there's decent climate reporting out there. You just have to look for it. And a lot of it's a mix. You'll get, say, Reuters, for example. I had a pop up yesterday for that. As Andrea mentioned, they've got they had a sustainability newsletter. And in that newsletter, they mentioned Antonio Gutierrez's comment about he's talking about media not taking sponsorships from fossil fuels anymore. And that very newsletter was sponsored by the American Chemistry Council, which is a fossil fuels lobby group. So, yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, as a news reader, you have to really scrutinize what you're reading and take a lot of time, certainly not read it from one source, I'd say. But there is good news out there that goes into depth on an issue. You just have to look for it and know where to look for it. Is a pretty good title. I'd say a lot of them are specialist titles. So I think you have to be prepared if you want to get to know a topic as, say, complex as climate science. You have to roll your sleeves up and be prepared to also wade through some specialist journals, not just ecobusiness. But Carbon Brief, for example, is a really good journal, alongside the mainstream stuff that will just take the the the, I guess, high just summary summaries of the news. So, yeah, you have to be prepared to to dig to get to the to the bottom of the story, I'd say. Yeah. So I've just put up my link to my weekend reads, which is basically exactly what you're saying. I just bring everything together that I'm reading, watching, listening to and put it in one place to make it easy for people because I know it's complicated for people to navigate the information overwhelm. So I've been doing this for years just to try and help everyone, because it's so important. We understand this and we stop being overwhelmed by it and and and start to work. Start to look and read and understand what the the big issues are, you know, rather than all the bullshit that's going on around the edges. And, yeah, and that that that lack of news younger people aren't reading the news. Like you said, it's that's really concerning. Right? So Sorry. How how do you aggregate that news? So how what what tool do you use when people together? That's that's me. It's literally me. I don't use. Yeah. Right. I did I just I I everything I read, watch, listen to, I just put it into WhatsApp chat. Once a week, I sit down and put it into this platform so that people could just see and just go through and look at the headlines, if nothing else, so they know what's going on. And, it covers every it it basically covers the polycrisis. So it's every aspect of what's going on in the world. But there's some funny stuff in there too because, as you know, I like I got a sense of humor. So, but yeah. So but it's for that. And anyone else who's who's good at navigating news, I I just really wanna encourage them to be out there sharing this. There's a handful of people everywhere on social media that are good at doing that, and, listen to them. You know? But we should let you go, Robin. Indeed. I really enjoyed that. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks, and thanks for joining us. Chat, David and Richard. Been a pleasure. Yeah. Take care. Alright. Have a good weekend. Take care. Alright. Bye. Bye. Oh, there you go. Wow. Some good stuff. And the the I I think there were 4 or 5 other questions that we didn't get to. But, it's alright. Yeah. And who who knows where it's gonna go? But I think I really wanted to so I'd like to, at some point, bring a couple of different journalists, maybe Robin, back and really talk about the business model of media because you you you you were talking about it there, Richard, you know, like Yeah. How how the media makes money is really, really important. And advertising is obviously huge. Right? But, it also puts pressure on them or whatever the publication is to create content that's in alignment with the, you know, the companies that are spending the money. Right? So and ever since social media, it's just been really interesting to watch how the news sources have have changed. And they've changed, you know, clickbait, gotta get eyeballs on to get the numbers, to get the advertisers, and that's not none of it's been in our interest. Absolutely not. And, you know, I I I have this huge fear. Right? I touched upon it earlier. I think, you know, press freedom and degrees of economic freedom are essential if you wanna build wealth. That's what encourages entrepreneurship. It encourages growth, etcetera. Now I always think there would be space because there will always be a certain demand for specific publication in particular subject areas where people are prepared to pay and actually pay quite a lot. And I think the financial industry is an example of that where you have some very, very targeted sources of important information that charges phenomenal amounts because it's expensive to dig into these stories. But what's happening with mainstream press and mainstream media where the vast majority of us get our broader information spectra, is that essentially you have eradicated what I would describe as proper journalism in favor of opinions. And if an opinion gets repeated often enough and broadly enough, it's being perceived as as actually being the truth and the wisdom, and this is what what actually is the case. Because it's not being attacked and debated properly by the people who are prepared to unearth the facts because the big newspapers and the big TV channels, all they're doing is essentially fire proper investigative journalism in favor of people, writing opinion pieces. And I I think it's a very, very dangerous route and path forward for mainstream media because I'm sure it's gonna become a backlash at some point. And it's actually not particularly beneficial to society at large who needs fact finders to be able to actually form our own opinions. And it's not helpful that you've been handed a whole gen generation who clearly struggles to absorb news in a proper fashion and watches TikTok and think that's news. That's not helpful. But I think that can get approached and tackled through other means. Fundamentally, people, I think, like us here, needs to understand that if you want facts and figures and proper journalism, you actually need to pay for it. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, I think that, you know, you take truth social and what's going on at the moment. And what you what you're gonna find is we're being swamped essentially by the the businesses and the interests wanting to broadcast their messages in the way that they can make sure it goes out in the way they want. So independent journalism, which is basically defined by the fact that you may not like what they say, but they would let their interview and then say what they think you're saying Yeah. And what it in that way. It's increasingly difficult to sustain, to to to continue because the people with the money increasingly want to be in control and create their own media channels to do that. So the the days before where you would have 2, 3 broadcasting channels for in each country And whether they were independent or state, that was, you know, take the UK, there was an independent one and there was a state public one in that way. And there was a remit in the state public one for it to be have a mandate which was independent in that form. It's being displaced. It's not actually being attacked and removed. It's simply being displaced by more money created and spent on creating their own channels that draw their own audiences into increasingly kind of small echo chambers of you. Yeah. And and that's really the the for me, the danger that we face is it's not that the investigative journalists don't get paid. Obviously, that's the consequence of it, but they don't get paid because we increasingly like listening to conversations that actually help reinforce our view. Yep. And we we we don't like we are uncomfortable with things that makes us think, well, actually, you know what? I really felt strongly about that, but now I'm having to think again. Whichever side it is, whichever side that might be. Absolutely. I find it so interesting, like, being in an echo chamber. I I'm regularly sitting in a very uncomfortable place with the media. I'm listening to, watching more, like, reading that, because I wanna I I don't know only wanna hear what other people have to say to who disagree with me. I wanna understand their words the words they use. You know? I wanna I wanna understand that, you know, the the underlying layers underneath. But the most important thing is I'm always challenging what I think is right. Because if I'm wrong, I wanna know. Yeah. And so what what I'm I what I I suppose maybe we need to get a psychologist on or something. But just why you know, like, truth social. I was I was gonna go and join it just to keep an eye on it because I would like to stay informed, but, you know, Twitter's still still good enough for the for that side of life. But could you imagine could you imagine what that environment is like where everyone's there for the same thing and it's just outrage? And you could just imagine in their bodies is, you know, this constant sort of, you know they'd be in this constant is it fight or flight that, you know, mode? You know? And everyone agrees with them. And I I couldn't think of I personally couldn't think of anything worse. Could you? No. It's it's absolutely awful. Right? And But we we we have sorry to interrupt that. We haven't extra big news from news article today of a report, basically, about the consequence of the AIs. We run out of independent pieces. Everything becomes AI generated. So if you're a journalist, you start using the AI to go along and, you know, if you're a lazy journalist, you start using the AI to write to beautify the piece. You know, as soon as I start typing a post in LinkedIn, it goes along and says, you know, use AI to rewrite it better. Yeah. And and all those things. So so the consequence of it is it reinforces all the echo chambers as we go forward. And and just by, you know, it's it's it's it's, it's like one of the this kind of, population things. You know, the the invasive population of the AI just takes over. Even though you think I I don't want to be to be within an echo chamber, all your sources are the products of an echo chamber. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you can I can tell? I can tell. Yeah. I always say to people, like, you know, having having written a couple of books and blogs and all that sort of stuff, if you don't create the content, you can't understand the content. So this idea that you can go into AI and write a couple of sentences and then it publish it produces a blog and then you tweak it with a few personal words, but you don't know you don't know what you're talking about. So if someone sort of stopped you on the street instead of talking to you about your blog, you wouldn't have the depth because it's a process of going through the creation of content that actually helps you understand it. Like, when I wrote Uncommon Courage, I was there were some chapters, and I went but 3rd 3rd review, you know, how you go through the process of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. And I was like, I've used the word integrity, for example. Do I know what integrity really, really means? And so then I'd go and do spend some time researching the word, and then I'd go and look at how I'd written. And sometimes I'd then there were there were things I had to change just a little bit because I hadn't used I hadn't used the word in the right way. You know? And it's it's time consuming. Knowledge is time consuming, but we're like, we're even fast fashion, fast food, fast furniture. Now we're in fast knowledge land. It's like That's a frightening plot. No. That's where we're going. Yeah. But it it it raises the simple question, you know. I hear I think politicians are particularly guilty. But if you are in a position where you can hire people yourself that you are going to go on working with. You know, I've been fortunate enough. I've been in positions where I've hired people. The last thing I'm looking for and the worst thing I can imagine is to hire a clone of myself. Someone with similar opinions, similar ideas about what, you know, how the world works and how you should trade and how you should make money effectively, you know, in in portfolio management. I wanna hire people who think diametrically the opposite of how I think because that way I become better. Fundamentally, I don't become better at my job by surrounding myself by people who do the same thing and think the same way. When you look at politicians now and, you know, it's different country from country, UK has a long tradition with very large civil service that surrounds the publicly elected ministers, etcetera. They all they seem to do is hire people like themselves with the same background, the same ideas, the same thought process. And, actually, it's not only a political failure. You look at most of the world's central banks. They probably all gone to school together, and they've all had put Paul Krugman, you know, giving a lecture to them at some point. I don't think that's a particularly smart way of operating in any form of organization because the diversity of views and diversity of backgrounds and diversity of thought process that that leads to is beneficial to the people involved. And still, when I look at my friends who are in the position of hiring hiring someone. You hire someone that will be enabling you to do your job better. That is the privilege of being in a position when you are allowed to present someone with an employment contract. Yeah. The problem I I have with that I mean, you know, Richard and I, we come from very similar background. Our our our role effectively is to, you know, how was it that was described? Basically, take money from people who are not just who who who just don't are not as smart as you are from the from the market, basically. That's what it was about. And that's how you get into this place. But a lot of people's jobs are there to promote the product that they are employed to promote. And goes to Andrea's comment earlier when I mentioned about, you know, what what if Pandora did something like that. Right? The whole the whole industry there is to promote it. The part of actually saying what happens when you keep oil and gas and coal in the ground is everything else has to retrench because that massive source of energy goes away. So, even for Pandora, it has to go along and says, actually, we can only buy into this if we're seriously willing to consider how our prospects of our growth, how we find our place with everyone else because there will be less of that energy that we rely on. And that's the reason why they won't go for it, not because of the promotion, because they think through. And so if they do go for it, they would need to go for it with a story that actually says how they will still be able to be there for you. And that's the that's the really important part. But most businesses are not required to think on that step, which is why we're having conversation, which is why we're having this climate courage issue is because the climate issue and Mike Wright with Antonio Antonio Gutierrez, in the way he's presenting it, not with him, but in the way he's presenting it, is to make it look like it's just one layer. Yeah. Stop the ads and it will all be done. Yeah. Well, look. But, you know, David, the the other thing that just drives me crazy about this whole conversation around fossil fuels. Okay. So tomorrow, we stop all fossil fuels. Right? There's all these implications that we all know. But the biggest the biggest implication is escalating heat. You don't have to take all the pollution pollution out of the ground and and and and clean up the earth and move on because you take all the pollution out of the earth, and we're seeing that. You know, there's a very clear track right across the northern hemisphere where the ships were going back and forth. They're taking the sulfur out of the ocean in that there's a strip of ocean at the north. Just the other day, I was, reading China's massive reduction in coal use. They think that's a big part of the Pacific Ocean heating up like it is. Right? Just in the last few months, India, Pakistan, all across Southeast Asia, an explosion of fossil fuels have happened, mainly coal and gas. So there's this a massive amount of pollution in the air. And we know that what you do here has an impact here, but it's not an immediate impact. It'll be a later impact. And that I I think the biggest frustration for me is putting all the pieces together, which is what people really struggle to do. You know? I feel like in Asia that, that those of us who've come out of this heat extreme, it's almost like it's forgotten now, and we made it. We'll be alright because it's going into linear. Right? But This is the crop losses. Next year, when it gets closer to 50 degrees, are are we gonna lose electricity? Therefore, many more people. But the food food security issues that are gonna really start to we might not see it this year. We might have enough reserves that we might not see it next year. But at some point, the food's gonna run out because, you know, in Europe, they've lost it for drought and floods. In the US, same. In Asia, it's heat. So with that that thinking and the preparation for the heat in the first place is just just driving me crazy because governments think it's just the poor people that are gonna be impacted. It's not. And we're seeing it in the in the US right now. It's a completely solid these aspects, you know, the where where the the basic physical things, you know, it gets a lot of things expand out. So what happens is our railway lines in the that that we're laying down, fast trains, ultra fast trains, and so on, the lines are tensioned for a particular temperature range. And so the trains all now have to run slower because we've exceeded that. Otherwise, what happens is the pressure of the train running fast will break the the lines. Right. The the the tracks. So it disrupts all of the transport. It disrupts all of the passenger travel. You wanna go home and meet your mom, and then you find that, actually, you're now delayed. Your trains are all delayed and all around. Nobody actually reports and says it's because we live in a a physical world and because we live in a physical world, when things change in it, it affects all of us in our ordinary lives. It's not just the people dying because they're losing their home to a rising sea. The same effect happens at your house. The same effect happens on your road about things just changing their shape as they get hotter. And because we now work in a world where everything is tuned to perfection, it can only go wrong because we've already tuned it to perfection. Yeah. For for for for for a future that doesn't exist. Right? Yes. And and and still the aspects of it that that's never really discussed, never really brought out. I mean, it's, it you know, for someone with with our background, it's a very alien thought process that you you don't really have an idea what will happen if things don't perform as you expected in your portfolio. How how do I get rid of the bad stuff and move on and, you know, protect my downside because no one wants to get poorer? And I can still try to capture the upside. What we see around us in all these examples that David mentioning is there is no thought process that says, what if it doesn't work? And and for me, that that's just an absolutely alien space to occupy, because my first thought is always what happens if things go wrong? Because I want to know what I'm supposed to do if things go wrong. And once I'm clear about that, then I'm very happy to engage in trying to extract and make as much money as possible from the upside. But you need to have some kind of understanding of the risks you're facing and what is my approach going to be if things don't exactly pan out as I hoped. And all I see around me are examples of complete lack of thought processes, which has said what happens if that goes wrong. And to me, it's it won't be It's stunning. Right? Yeah. It's a completely alien parallel universe to which I have spent my 56 years. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Right. I've been listening to a lot of, philosophers lately. So Iain McGilchrist in in the UK, and there's an a a guy I'm I'm about to share a 3 hour interview. Daniel Ratzenberger, I think that's how you say his surname. Have you come across him? He's the guy with the big white beard. And I I I really encourage people to listen to those sort of people right now because their job is to understand the story of humanity and how we exist in the world. And I think it sort of answers a lot of questions, but my conclusion is that we've got too many people in leadership positions who are basically sociopathic to what their tendencies are. But the other side of it is just incapable of thinking long term. So, you know, when I worked in big corporations, the focus was always the quarter and the year. But then when you work in live in Asia for a long time, you I remember doing a a a job with SoftBank, and their vision and mission was 30 years. You know? And everything that they did was about moving towards that sort of long term goal, whereas the western sort of way of doing things is short term. I think I think we've got a problem with the leadership in the world. Politics, business, media, publishers, I think we've got a problem with the the quality of the way that people think. And, I'm really happy to see the philosophers stepping up because you you can tell they don't want to. Some of them are very uncomfortable in their interviews, but it's like they've all come together and said, what's the problem? We need to get out there and start speaking up so that we can wake people up before it's too late. You know, I don't know if you saw the European Union, the EU elections. They've really been successful with the young, young voters. The right wing and and hard right wing parties are successful with young voters. How how did that Well, they But but But but, seriously, like, their future is not gonna be better if they if they if they vote that path. And I'm I don't know how that happened. But it's it's again, I think, going back to kind of the simplicity of the message and the inability of, perhaps scrutinize facts and figures that if I claim something often enough and I do it in an efficient way and I'm engaging with the people I'm targeting, they will eventually perceive this as being the truth. I think it's just the efficiency of how you deliver that, that they were better at working at than others. But it it's it's, essentially, it's no difference than politics was a 100 years ago. Right? And we all know what happened in the thirties. So if if you say, a lie often enough, it eventually becomes the truth because it's not being challenged. So, again, the law of course have a role to play and we Exactly. Have a role to play. But that that's probably one of the articles that's alarmed me the most. It was just reading it just before we jumped on. Young voters are so pissed off in Europe that they're gonna go and vote hard right, and there is no way that's gonna be good for them in the long run. From from from a climate perspective, from a freedom perspective, it's not gonna secure their jobs. It's not gonna it's not gonna like, any of the things that they think that they are voting for, I just don't think are gonna be delivered if that's the decision that they make based on history. No. But, you know, young voters everywhere are pretty angry because they, I would say, legitimately, rightly we think that our generation have stolen their future because of the choices we made and perhaps a generation even ahead of us, before us. So they become a very receptive audience for people who might have actually even a good agenda and believe in their agenda. But certainly, also for people with a bad agenda that is more about enhancing their own, prospect. However, it is very clear to me, as you know, an ardent student of history that when when the mainstream operators fails, the mainstream structures of society starts breaking down for a variety of reasons. People are not gonna come to the center. They are gonna go left and they're gonna go right, and it seldom ends well. Yeah. And it's worth bearing in mind. And, you know, I, personally, I don't really like far right or far left politics because I think their intellectual arguments don't stand up to scrutiny. And therefore, it doesn't make me mainstream, but it makes me a cross of right and left arguments in how you build a better society. But it's very clear that history tells us that disenchanted angry young voters are not gonna come to the ballot boxes and vote for a mainstream party, and that becomes a real problem for existing politics today. And they better figure out how to tackle it pretty soon. Yeah. I don't know. I think it for me, it was, we're already here, are we? I knew this was coming, but we're already here. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Do you wanna do you wanna wrap up? I'm seeing, David, you're, talking talking to the comments on, LinkedIn, which is awesome. As you Yeah. Jump on it, do it after the fact, because trying to keep trying to keep it running here. But, I wanna finish with so we're gonna talk about, every 2 weeks, you're gonna have to come up with an idea. Right? So every time I talk to anyone, about this topic, people say to me, what can I do? So if you were gonna leave everyone with one tip of what they could do to act positively for the future of humanity and all life on earth, what would you what would you recommend? I would I would, you know, basically say what Richard and I are very much doing at the moment, which is to ask yourself what does it mean for you to thrive with climate change? K. And allow that to open up the conversations, to open up the materials you're gonna look for, to open up the way you're gonna think about how you can have the things you enjoy doing, have the situations around you, the community, and the places around. And what shape would it would it would it actually require? What what sort of shape would it actually need? What are the things that you can't tip everything, so what goes out the window or stays in in in that way, and really start thinking about what that thriving climate change means. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Very much on, you know, on the same page. And what I say would probably echo what David just mentioned. But the last part is super important to me in the sense that I think future is gonna be quite chaotic possibly, but certainly challenging for most people because of the structural force that the climate crisis is bringing on to society. One of the best things you can do is actually focus on what's really important to you and what's kind of nice but not essential. And start figuring out the world where you safeguard what's really, really important to you. And be prepared for how you're gonna transit and thrive in that world by holding on to the bits and pieces that really matters to you. Because that's what's gonna keep you going. Yeah. I like that. Well, I wanna I wanna leave my tip in alignment with the theme for today, and it's something I've talked a lot about over the years. If you care about journalism in this space, pay for it. If you can afford to, pay for it. So I have about 6 different subscriptions to media. There's a lot more that I could be paying for, but you can't pay for them all. But, I'm I'm committed to investing in the in the publications that, I believe are doing a good job because I wanna help them continue because I think that they're really, really important. Some are mainstream and some are small. Eco Business, who Robin writes for, I've been subscribed to them. I'm paying subscribers to them for a couple of years. So I really recommend getting behind them, and it's a it's a really big it's a it's a it's a great insight into what's going on in this region, and I think it's an important region. The 60 2% of the world's population lives in this part of the world. So it's an important region to pay attention to, but also to put that lens over the top and understand when you're reading it to see between the lines like everything else. But yeah. So I think we could do lots more conversations on this. But our next Climate Courage, we're gonna talk about climate change and religion, which, of course, potentially could be a risky topic. I've got, Gracious Dennis, and I think he's from, Uganda, but but we'll find out. I've just met him through Twitter, but he I I heard him speak on a chat, and he it was very interesting. And we've also got Tim Wade joining us, and you you guys know Tim from the no show. And it's actually it was Tim and I first started talking about doing this as a as a show quite a while ago when we had a some commentary on our, on social media basically saying, stop it. You don't need to talk about this. God will sort it out. And I found that an incredibly ignorant perspective. Tim Tim found it, an, you know, an alarming perspective. So that's where it kinda started from, and and, we're seeing what the pope's doing. We're seeing what, the leadership in the in the Muslim faith are doing. I'm trying to secure someone from, from the Muslim faith to come and join us. I haven't succeeded yet. If you've got any, ideas of people who are spiritual, religious no, I wanna focus on religion. So we've got Richard, are you a atheist? No. No. No? I'm not. But, I I have some atheist streaks in my belief. Tendencies. Yeah. Tendencies. Yes. So you you David, you're Catholic. Right? Yeah. Yes. Yes. So so we We yeah. A a practicing Catholic. Richard? No. Not practicing. No. No. Okay. Alright. So yeah. Alright. So I was raised with Catholicism. So Yep. But I would put myself in the agnostic basket these days. So I wanna get a I wanna get a group of us that, can sort of represent it, some who who are actively, practicing as well as those who are not. But I think it's an important topic within the conversation, and I think the churches and the temples and the mosques are incredibly important places in the world where some powerful conversations and changes could be happening. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Are you looking forward to that? I think I think what would be interesting, and Richard and I should try and reach out and see if we can, I don't know if anyone from the Faith Invest Group is listening, which are a group that's involving all the faiths, with regards to their investments and how that Yeah? Right. How how to how to give power of their faith to their investments, basically. Okay. And I think, you know, it would be nice to see whether we can we can actually connect to any of them on that. So may maybe we should Richard, now we should try sending out an invitation or 2. Yeah. Yeah. We can certainly do that. And and, yeah, like you said, they're multi faith really. So, they're very much multi faith. I mean, they they Yeah. Yeah. Grotius will definitely talk about the multi faith approach to climate communication Yeah. In Africa. And that that's what I found really compelling about his his discussion. And so yeah. So if you've got anyone else or if you're out there and you're listening and you think this is a conversation that you wanna be part of, it's sorta we we don't attack anyone here for their ideas. We we listen and we hear each other and we have opposing views, which which which is very welcome. But I'm I'm really looking forward to that. So, alright. Show number 2. Yes. Indeed. That'll be great. Yep. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Welcome forward to number 3. And contribute to the comments. You know, just build that up. Next time, we can get more. Yeah. No. Definitely. So, yeah, it's been great to see all the comments. So have a great weekend, everyone. We'll see you in 2 weeks. See you. Yep. See you. See you then. Bye.