Matt Winning 0:00

And climate really stuck out at the time because it was something that was , you know , essentially this enormous problem that was happening that nobody really seemed to be addressing or talking about . And I guess I was kind of surprised . I was like why isn't everybody working in this area ? Why isn't this an enormous topic that we're getting taught in every subject , taught in every ?

Ryan Grant Little 0:28

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves . Matt Winning is a very unique combination of environmental researcher and stand-up comedian . He has one of the funniest TEDx talks I've seen , both because of his material and because the audience at first didn't really know how to react . He's been a presenter on the BBC and , as a veteran , at Edinburgh Festival , fringe or , as the cool kids call it , just Edinburgh I reached Matt in London . Help me out now by rating and subscribing to this podcast wherever you listen to it , and maybe even sharing this episode with a friend . Since I don't advertise , it's the only way people find out about it . I'm Ryan Grant-Middle . Great to have you here , matt . Welcome to the podcast .

Matt Winning 1:15

Hi Ryan , how are you doing ?

Ryan Grant Little 1:16

Yeah , I'm great . Thanks To set the scene . I want to quote you because I think this captures kind of a couple of the angles from which you approach climate tech or climate . I speak about net zero most days , mostly to myself in the shower . This makes a lot of sense , of course , given my job as an environmental researcher , so I think that already kind of points out that you like to use comedy a bit in how you talk about this stuff and you wear a few different hats . So one of them is as a lecturer of economics of sustainability at UCL University College , london Institute for Sustainable Resources . You have an illustrious academic career with degrees in law and economics . Why don't you take us back to the beginning of that kind of academic career as a student ? Bring us up to date . And I understand also that you might be starting a new position in the academic side on top of it all . So reach back and bring us up to date yeah , of course .

Matt Winning 2:15

So I think I got interested in climate in about 2005 , which was when the I think the kyoto was came into force for the first time . So it was back like kind of fairly early days , I guess is what you would call it . And I was a law student at the time and I did a course in environmental law which was really sort of quite eye-opening to me . It's not something I'd really thought about . I'd gone through like my undergraduate degree and hadn't really enjoyed any subjects , and then I came across that subject and really enjoyed it and then so it sort of stayed in there for a couple of years and but I went off and I was working at BlackRock for a year back in 2006 , something like that , when it was still not quite as , anywhere near as large as it became . So I've served in the investment world and I went back and did a master's degree in economics and while I was there again I took like an optional course which was on environmental economics and quickly realized that it was an area I was really interested in . Still , you know , the sort of application of different subjects whether that's law , economics or whatever but to environmental issues . And climate really stuck out at the time because it was something that was , you know , essentially this enormous problem that was happening that nobody really seemed to be addressing or talking about , and I guess I was kind of surprised . I was was like why isn't everybody working in this area ? Why isn't this a an enormous you know topic that we're getting taught in every you know subject ? So I then just sort of happened by luck to apply for a PhD , because I was .

Matt Winning 4:01

It was 2008 and obviously the financial crisis basically smashed in at that point in time and I was a bit unsure of whether to go back into the world of investment . Nobody liked bankers at the time Most people still don't , if I'm honest and so I wasn't sure if that's what I wanted to do with my life . I clearly had a bit of a passion for these sort of environmental issues and , in particular , climate stood out to me , and so I got offered this one phd that I had applied for , which was looking at . Originally , it was supposed to look at marine energy . Specifically , it was the macroeconomics of marine energy in the uk . Turns out , there is no macroeconomics of marine energy in the uk , and , however many years later , what are we talking ? So , 16 years later , well it'd be .

Ryan Grant Little 4:53

It would be a short thesis and easy to defend . Yeah , exactly that was .

Matt Winning 4:56

That was the point . I was like , well , this is going to be pretty uh brief , which is there is none . So I decided to pivot and we'd already got the funding and I sort of had to look at marine energy in there somewhere in the mix of renewables . But really I kind of broadened that out . And that's when I started so 2008 , started my PhD .

Matt Winning 5:16

I did that for four years looking at carbon taxes and kind of policy instruments and institutions . So institutions , like in the UK , we've got the Climate Change Committee , although I refuse . Originally they were called the Committee on Climate Change and then the name change happened a few years ago to the Climate Change Committee , which everyone just called them anyway . You know semantics , but in my PhD I had to be correct about what their title was , which is the Committee on Climate Change . So I still refuse to call them by the name that every single other person in climate policy I guess in the UK calls them , which is the Climate Change Committee , because I'm like I wrote it 90 times in my PhD the correct way . I will never , you know , I'll never go back , anyway . So I did my PhD and then I worked straight up from there .

Matt Winning 6:05

I went to ucl and did research basically for about 11 years in climate , various different aspects of kind of climate policy , mostly around climate change mitigation using kind of integrated assessment models . So , again , a lot of the studies that you read , uh , or headlines that you read , you know this is what I can . When people ask me what do you do , I'm like right , well , you know , when you read a headline in a newspaper that says we've got 10 years left to save the world , now , normally that will then be from some average of lots of reports , take , so the ipcc will take a bunch of like the literature out there telling us how quickly we need to mitigate , to reach , you know , whatever target 1.5 degrees , and so that number of years will be some sort of like average of lots of different academic studies , and one of my studies will be one of those 20 papers that they've sort of averaged out to go okay , okay , this is how quickly we need to change .

Ryan Grant Little 7:06

I feel like when you give a date for the end of the world , then averages probably is not the right measure .

Matt Winning 7:12

Yeah , yeah , and also I would like to say we don't say the end of the world . That is very much the news . The academic study says if you want to hit this target , then you have . You know , and there's lots of caveats and it's one scenario or a couple of scenarios that are already averaged out . So there's all this sort of averaging across various stuff and then they go . Well , we just put one number out there and everyone around the world starts , you know , being terrified and going , ah , it's the end of the world . And you go well , it's not , it's just , you know , we're just telling you how bad it is or how quickly you need to do stuff .

Matt Winning 7:49

So , yeah , I worked on academia for about 11 years there and then I spent a year in the private sector there at a consultancy kind of heading up their climate research , which was interesting , trying to work out , like , what is actually happening . You know where the money is , who's's actually doing what , and like , how much do the financial services sector actually understand about climate change ? And I think it's important because there's a bit of a communications issue there . Where are they understanding what the literature says ? Do they understand the concepts well enough ? So that was interesting , so I did that for year , but I've , literally just in the last week , started back at UCL , where I was before , as you say , as a lecturer , but specifically doing some teaching , as opposed to .

Matt Winning 8:32

So .

Matt Winning 8:32

I've spent 12 years doing lots of research and I'm now kind of coming back to do teaching specifically a couple of days a week and then I'm using the rest of my time to do comedy because Because I think actually I'm not saying we've got all the science , but we kind of know where we are , we know what we have to do .

Matt Winning 8:52

We don't really need too many more studies telling us we're doomed . What I think we need to do is , more importantly , train up the people that will be going into the jobs to solve the problems . And also I think there's a communications problem with the wider public and with the media in general and all that sort of stuff . So the comedy stuff for me , I think , is actually really important and there's not really many other people doing that communications aspect , which is trying to get people to understand climate change in a way that I guess appeals to them or in a way that doesn't make them run for the hills straight away and makes it maybe a bit easier to digest the information . So that's , yeah , hopefully that's a very hopefully succinct but of a very complicated career .

Ryan Grant Little 9:35

It's funny . I mean , I got involved in climate in about 2005 , I guess , and back then , and maybe you felt the same way . But you know , I expected that the issues you would face are , like you know , are we going to be able to do this from a technology standpoint ? Can we reverse this ? And I took for , given that everybody's going to be pulling in the same direction .

Ryan Grant Little 9:54

You know , it's like the alien invasion movies and stuff , where kind of everybody unites and is fighting against this one foe , and now it's the opposite , where I'm like I'm pretty sure the technology , like we've you know , from what I can tell , we've got most of what we need , but we have , like I mean , using that analogy with the aliens . I mean , like all the aliens have to do is pay , you know , 20 grand to a TikTok influencer to like just put out their point of view on this and they'll happily do it right . So we're , I guess , what is it in this post-truth economy and all this kind of stuff , where it really is about the messaging right . It's really about like , how do we get people to care about this ? And like I mean , why do people not in the first place ?

Matt Winning 10:37

it seems , I mean , it is literally existential yeah , I completely agree like there was so much more of a focus on the , I guess , the technological side and what are the solutions , and I think we've done most of that work , certainly the majority of it . Even in the last couple of years I sort of came into view with some of the even harder options . So I feel like we've got to a stage now it's taken whatever 15 years or something to just understand the solution , space and what's required . But , as you say , there's been sort of not as much movement on the actual sort of willingness and understanding of what needs to be done and how quickly things need to be done and , as you , and how much of an existential crisis it is . I feel like it changed around 2019 a little bit in terms of the general acceptability and understanding of climate change and from a sort of general public point of view like greta thunberg , fridays for future , that kind of era yeah , well , I think what happened was there was quite a lot in 2018 , certainly in the uk .

Matt Winning 12:30

there was just a kind of a few confluences of different things . So we had a really warm summer in the UK . That meant we were seeing climate impacts for the first time , and then you had , off the back of that , you had Extinction Rebellion , and then you had Greta Thunberg , and so all of these things happened in quite quick succession , where , for me , being someone that had , similar to yourself , had worked on climate for a long time it was the first time that people were wanting to talk to me about climate change . It was the first time that it felt like it was part of . I mean , in the way that I noticed it was that , as a as somebody who talks about it using comedy , no other comedians had jokes about climate change and then , all of a sudden , in 2019 , every comedian had a joke about climate change and it just showed you how it sort of had slipped into this , the zeitgeist that year , and I I think we've you know what covid happened and , as you say , there's lots of other post-truth things and you know social media , other things that have made it difficult to make lots of momentum with kind of the public acceptability around climate , but I don't think you can put it back in the box Once people have experienced something , they're not going to forget about it , they're not going to go oh , that didn't happen .

Matt Winning 13:43

But it's just . Yeah , it's sort of we moved , we stepped up a notch , but we've not kind of continued stepping up our urgency around it , if you know what I mean .

Ryan Grant Little 13:53

I mean , you mentioned Britain , where you're from . You mentioned Britain where you're from and you hosted a really brilliant four-part series for the BBC called Net Zero A Very British Problem and you very cleverly also broke it down to four key themes , one episode per theme heat , road transport , food and future-proofing . And that made me think of the I kept having in my head when I was listening to it the cookbook Salt , fat Acid and Heat , which is that you know , that cookbook that , like , probably a whole bunch of people like me bought , and then , when you look at a recipe like this is way too hard for me . I'm making spaghetti . So the BBC is a pretty big platform , of course , and so I'm curious , like this is four years ago , what kind of response did you get around that time , both from , like you know , regular people in England and Wales and Scotland , northern Ireland , and also from other kind of groups who are , like you know , we want to do a series like this or , you know , did you get the Netflix special kind of on the back of that ?

Matt Winning 14:49

No Netflix special yet , unfortunately , but I'm working on it . I'm working on it . Yeah , it was interesting to do . We put it together quite quickly . You think you know a lot of the time . You think , oh , you know , these things are going to be really planned out and really sort of detailed . I was asked to do it kind of only really a couple of months beforehand and didn't have a huge amount of time to prepare for it and sort of had to work quite hard to get it done . But I think I was quite happy with it .

Matt Winning 15:15

The one thing that happened was the first episode that came out came out I think the day after , or certainly one or two days after the queen passed away in the uk , which meant everybody was on high wire and nobody wanted to do so . There was a couple of jokes that they had to cut from it because because whoever I don't know , the bbc higher up in the bbc were like yeah , yeah , no , we don't . We don't want to offend anybody . So it was a bit strange . So the first episode is weird for me because it's not got any jokes in it and it's just more of a , and I don't think you notice too much , but I noticed from a sort of a person who's used to having understanding where to make it funny and we're not and that sort of thing . But it was good it was . I got to speak to some really excellent people for it get some different voices , try to kind of show what we had to do in the uk where what were the key areas that really needed tackling and really needed tackling soon . You know heat and transport in the uk in particular , I think , are really important . We're really bad , like you know . We're quite a cold country so the heat aspect needs to be tackled quite quickly and we've done nothing for decades compared to what we've done with the electricity sector . So yeah , it was good and the feedback was really quite positive .

Matt Winning 16:29

You had a couple of people . When something goes out at that sort of level , you do have the odd person emailing in telling you that you're wrong about something that you're not wrong about , and you know there's tricky subjects to be tackled there . You know I spoke to . You know one of the episodes was on food . So you know the farmers union got in contact and kind of asked to talk about some stuff and we did try . I think you know we got some farmers involved in the episode and we tried to kind of , you know , we tried to show that it was .

Matt Winning 16:59

You know there's difficulties here , like is , you know you try to be as positive as you can but really you're talking about hard choices to be made in certain sectors not every sector , but certain sectors . There's really hard choices to be made and you need real , really good government support and intervention for those sectors . Right , and I understand that's what you know , that's one of the ways which you get a bit of pushback , I guess on climate from certain , I guess political dispositions and stuff like that is they're like , it's just government intervention . You know governments are intervening , they're doing too much , but what you're trying to do is you're trying to intervene in areas that if you don't intervene , there's going to be a massive amount of hardship . Right , you're going to some sectors are really really going to struggle and so you need that and you need the coordination of certain things like heat .

Matt Winning 17:48

In the uk , for instance , people can't necessarily afford to , you know , pay an extra 10 000 pounds to just change their boiler to an electric , you know , heat pump or something like that .

Matt Winning 17:59

The funding isn't there . The coordination of how to do that isn't there for insulation and stuff . You need some sort of national or localized schemes that make this easy for people to do , that , give people the help to do it , otherwise it won't be done . So there's some elements of coordination that need done in certain sectors and then there's other sectors where you actually , you know you just need some light touch policy in place to allow the sectors to flourish , to allow that innovation to happen , to get the startups , you know , through those hard years or whatever it is . So I guess it was good to do that series , because you're sort of looking at different topics and different issues and some of them have one solution that needs more intervention and other ones don't need so much intervention , and you can kind of tell some of the more positive stories about what's happening in transport or whatever , and and heavy industry and those sort of areas that are actually , you know , making quite good strides quite quickly .

Ryan Grant Little 18:59

Food , I think , is the third rail on that right . People get really touchy about it . It's the cultural implications , what you know , the strength of the farmer lobbies in every country pretty much , and it's a hard transition to make .

Matt Winning 19:12

A very hard transition and , as you say , people don't like being told what to do . You know , and that's important because you need to bring the public along with you when you're doing climate change , but that's why you need real coordination and real thought about this from quite a high level . But you need it to translate to local levels where you've got local needs . So you need what you know sort of whether it's local councils or where you live , you know . Whoever's in charge of the local area also needs to understand climate and what's going to happen in the local area , whether it's to jobs or whether it's to the climate . And again , that comes back to you know , does everybody actually understand the issue enough and what the solutions might be ?

Matt Winning 19:53

As to your other question , which was have people asked me to do more on this ? Have people ? So I do a lot of kind of , I guess , public speaking and corporate speaking and stuff now , and so it was good . The radio series was really good , uh , for sort of making people more aware of what I do and , yeah , definitely some work came off the back of it . I think we'd need another . We're looking at pitching some different series on that and I'm kind of working up a few new ideas as well . But yeah , hopefully it might take another few years , but hopefully it's going to become more of a you know a thing that more and more whether it's TV , radio or other companies or podcasts people want that sort of content .

Ryan Grant Little 20:34

Nice .

Matt Winning 20:41

Well , I'm sure , after being on this , podcast .

Ryan Grant Little 20:42

Your phone is going to ring off the hook . Yeah , I'm hoping , actually . Yeah , I'll need to check . I've not got my phone on me just now . You'll want to clear your schedule .

Ryan Grant Little 20:44

So the net zero goal for Britain is 2050 . And I think that these numbers we hear goals 2040 , 2035 , 2050 all the time , and it's important to contextualize it right , because these future years always sound far away and I think you did a really good job of this by saying that that's as far away in the future as Four Weddings and a Funeral is in the past , the release of the Hugh Grant movie and , as you also mentioned , he still looks pretty good , so it's not that long . And so do you feel like ? I mean , as you mentioned , you can't kind of unsee summers like 2019 and that type of thing , but do you think that in Britain , people still have that kind of urgency ? Is it increasing or are they ambivalent about it ? Again , to quote you the way you and I are about finding out when U2 releases a new album , which is the perfect definition of ambivalence in 2024 .

Matt Winning 21:40

Yeah , it's a really good point and I think that you know , are we understanding the urgency enough ? No , the answer is definitely no . The amount that either needs to change in a short time or the amount that will change . You know the actual , you know climate that will change in quite a short time . I don't think people understand , and it's because we're really bad at thinking in sort of non-linear ways . As humans . We think things will always take twice as long to become twice as bad , and it's just , it's not the way that this works .

Matt Winning 22:16

It's a difficult thing to explain to people and to get them to really comprehend how quickly things are gonna and I hope I'm allowed to swear here go to shit . You know it's only going to ramp up in that time period and so we're going to be dealing with more and more shit as well as then trying to , in that time period , speed up how quickly we're doing stuff . And so people like me have basically been banging on for the last whatever 16 years that you need to start acting as soon as you can . And it's not based on nothing . It's not based on the fact that , oh , I think we need to , a feeling that we need to do it or that because I care so much we need to do it , or that because I care so much we need to do it , literally because of the studies that we look at , the economics of it says the sooner you start acting , the less difficult this is going to be as we go forward , because otherwise you're going to be dealing with lots of crisis at the same time and you're going to be trying to do too much in too short a period of time . That then that's actually going to harm certain industries . So you need to start acting and the problem is that we've , certainly in the UK , had a government in power there for 14 years that showed that it doesn't know how to act quickly during , for instance , covid .

Matt Winning 23:30

The idea of changing things or making sacrifices earlier , because it's going to mean a lot less sacrifice over the medium to long term . It's just not a way of thinking that the people in charge of our country have had and that's , if anything , to me , is one of the main causes of slow action on climate change has been a lack of and it's not a lack , it's just the way those people understand the world . I don't think we are going to change them , but having certain people in power at a certain time in history will affect the amount of suffering around the world for millennia , and that is a fact . And I don't think any of those people would ever consider that to be the case or think about how , what their role in the kind of wider sphere of humanity would be . And again , that's because they're dealing with day to day stuff to some extent . But yeah , it's been frustrating , I guess , to say the least .

Matt Winning 24:43

That's the kind of messaging I tend to use a lot as well , and if I combine that with my kind of other passion , which is victory for Ukraine , the net effect is that generally that I just get invited to fewer dinner parties no-transcript , but yeah anyway .

Ryan Grant Little 25:06

so I'm going to do one more quote . I see I've got a whole bunch of quotes from doing my research on you , but it's because you have so many quotable quotes . You said the thing about being an environmental researcher is that if you don't laugh , you'll probably cry . You are a professional comedian as well , and I'd be curious to hear a little bit about how you decided to , or how you know , maybe it wasn't even a decision , just a happenstance that the comedy and the research and lecturing combined .

Matt Winning 25:31

Yeah , that was happenstance , but a happy happenstance shall we say it was . I'd been doing comedy separately as a way to not think about climate change , as a way to not talk about it as like a thing . For me , that was my hobby and then sort of became like a part-time job and it was entirely separate . And so for years and years people would be like oh so what are you going to do ? Are you going to become a comedian or are you going to become an academic ? And so I was always like , oh yeah , I don't really know . I'm sort of I enjoy both of these things .

Matt Winning 26:01

I think a lot of comedians cannot wait to be able to give up their day job like .

Matt Winning 26:06

A lot of comedians are sort of itching to drop that normal life to be able to do comedy properly and jump into it .

Matt Winning 26:14

I've been doing comedy for , you know , 16 years or something , and it's taken me most of that time to get to a stage where comedy's become even like just more than half of my sort of time and income and that sort of thing .

Matt Winning 26:30

And that's probably slightly because I work on climate change and actually it's I'm interested in my job . I think it's an important job and I'm actually , in the long term , then I've been glad that I , you know , kind of stuck doing that , because it's it's meant that I've found a way to combine the things that I enjoy doing and also the things that I think are important to do in life , and I think it really was luck that I did that . But I think not many people find that , you know , I don't that sort of sweet spot , and so , yeah , there's like some I can't remember what it's called there's like some japanese term where it's like , you know , to help people work out what they want to do with their life , and it's like you find like a combination of like what do you enjoy doing , what is a good use of your skill set and also what can you get paid to do ?

Ryan Grant Little 27:18

it's like this venn diagram , right ?

Matt Winning 27:20

yeah , exactly yeah , it's like I'm not gonna butcher it , I can't remember it's like it could carry or something . I can't remember , um , but I always stuck with me and then I sort of felt like a couple of years ago I just managed to find that , which was amazing , doing comedy about climate change , and so it's been really sort of a useful thing for me to do . From a personal point of view , you know , I feel satisfied with my career doing that and I think it has a positive effect . But it was kind of luck . Basically , I ran out of material and then decided to write a show about climate change as like a kind of last attempt at like I should write a show about climate change , as like a kind of last attempt at like I should write a show about something that I know about , like I'll go out all guns blazing here like , and so I just like I'm gonna write .

Matt Winning 28:03

I don't think anyone wants to hear about climate change . Really , it was 2017 , 2016 , 2017 , and I was like I don't really think anyone's that interested in it . Nobody really in the comedy industry talks about it or is interested in it . But I'm just going to do this . I'm going to write this because I know about it , I'll know what I'm doing , I've got something to say that no one else is saying and , like , I'll try and make it work and that sort of , yeah , that decision , that quite risky decision , kind of last roll of the dice from a comedy perspective , has sort of changed my yeah , the root of my life now , and so , yeah , and it's been really positive in terms of , like , how people react to it you performed a few weeks ago at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and that's one of my like , it's one of the only things on my bucket list .

Ryan Grant Little 28:49

I really want to go to that and I was like lined up and then COVID and blah , blah , blah . Just so you know for listeners who aren't familiar with it , and for me maybe , because my point of reference might be out of date by now . What is Edinburgh Fringe and what are you supposed to call it ? If you're cool , what do the cool people call it ? Because I feel like you're the institute for it . It's probably just like oh , you just call everyone who knows just calls it fringe or something like that .

Matt Winning 29:15

Well , I guess everybody that knows probably just calls it edinburgh . Ah , but that's confusing if you're having a conversation that isn't within the sphere of comedy can I just jump in there ?

Ryan Grant Little 29:26

because I had an issue like that happened . I was at a bar once in berlin many years ago and this whole group of people just came in at once and I was talking to them and I was like , so what are you doing in Berlin ? We're going to Florence . And I'm like , oh , so do you have a layover ? Or something like that . And they just looked at me like I was an idiot . I'm like the Florence and the Machine concert .

Matt Winning 29:49

Yeah , I guess that probably happens to lots of people that talk to comedians . The comedians are so self-centered they don't notice that that's what's happening . So the edinburgh festival fringe , I think it's what you're supposed to call it , but the fringe I think it's that way around , yeah , but anyway the fringe , or or just if you're a comedian , edinburgh is a month-long arts festival in edinburgh , scotland , where I studied , so where I lived for six years . Great city , beautiful city , so it's in a wonderful place . It's been going on for decades and decades and decades and it's basically the biggest kind of comedy trade fair in the world . It's also not curated , so literally anyone can do it . So you get everybody from like the biggest comedy stars in the UK to someone that's decided that they want to do comedy for the first time , and everybody's sort of on it roughly on an equal footing . It depends how much backing you have and money and stuff , but basically everyone is part of the fringe and it lasts for far too long . So weeks on it , you know , it's like three and a half weeks of shows every day . Everyone is part of the fringe and it lasts for far too long . So weeks on it , you know , it's like three and a half weeks of shows every day and there's thousands of shows and it's basically for a comedian it's .

Matt Winning 31:07

It's a wonderful thing to do if you want to lose thousands of pounds , but also a wonderful thing to do if you want to get good at your craft . So I did it every year for , I think , 11 years and then covid hit and then I've done it another couple of times . So , yeah , I'm not sure in total , I don't , I'm not even sure how many years I've done it , but basically you would go there and it's a very , you know , intense for a month just doing comedy every day , several times a day , for you know however long , and you'll learn how to do it essentially . And then , once you learn how to do it , then you go back and write a new , a new piece or a new , whatever it is you want to talk about . So it's wonderful , it's the best thing in the world and also horrible and difficult at the same time .

Matt Winning 31:53

I went , actually .

Matt Winning 31:54

So I only went to cop , you know , the , the un conference of the parties a couple of years ago for the first time in glasgow , and then I've been since , but um , but the first time I went to that the only way I could kind of describe it to people was that it felt like doing the edinburgh fringe in the sense that it's this .

Matt Winning 32:12

It's focused on one thing , you know , it's focused on like a topic and everybody from that world pretty much feels like they're there and descend on a place and the whole city becomes kind of about that thing and everybody's talking about it and most people shouldn't be there or don't need to be there , but they are and some good stuff happens from it . But also people put too much emphasis on it and so it felt very similar going to cop for the first time and I was like oh , the fact and it's just very overwhelming , I guess , is the other thing you don't really know what to go . You spend your whole time running about going what should I see , what should I be doing , and not until you've done it several times , you don't quite know how to navigate it .

Matt Winning 32:54

I guess sounds like life , yeah , and life in general , life in general but there are probably fewer uh lobbyists at edinburgh I mean there's still some people that I guess would be , yeah , not oil and gas lobbyists , yeah a lot less lobbyists some people that you know , industry people that I guess some would consider evil , but very much not evil to the same extent .

Ryan Grant Little 33:17

Yeah , okay , yeah , they're talent scouts for Netflix or something like that . Yeah , fair , fair . How has your act changed over time there , or has it ? I mean , I guess , if it's 11 years ago , you were doing sort of more traditional comedy about airplane meals and , exactly , I did a lot of , yeah , that sort of thing , trying it for about seven years .

Matt Winning 33:39

It was just that sort of traditional but a bit weird . Myself was quite weird , slightly offbeat I guess , but it was a bit more what you would call traditional stand-up . And then the last kind of maybe four years , five years of shows that I've done have all been much more . I guess the materials may be a little bit more normal , but because it's about climate change , it feels a bit more removed from stand-up . So actually I've had to become . My persona has become less weird because essentially I'm going on stage , going . You actually have to trust me here . I I'm a lecturer , I'm a real person , as opposed to going on being like I'm going to talk about flying cats or whatever it is . You can't be quite as offbeat and whimsical and expect to take people on a journey where you're talking about you know , real things you've got to establish your bona fides first , kind of with the lecturing side .

Ryan Grant Little 34:35

Yeah absolutely .

Matt Winning 34:36

And so because even then people would come going like , is this a guy ? Pretend , like , is this a character , is this someone that's pretending to be a what you know ? Talk about climate change , because nobody knows if you , if people don't know who you are , then but I guess the good thing for me is , like most of the people in comedy you know in the comedy world do know that that's what I have always done , and so other comedians were like , oh no , he's a real . You know , this is what he does , this is who he is . So that's helped .

Matt Winning 35:02

But yeah , you kind of have to go on stage and sort of , I guess , make people trust you and make people like you . If you're going to make them talk to them about that for an hour at a time , the good thing is that people generally are really receptive to it and actually are much more willing to talk to you about it . Like I always have loads of people wanting to speak to me afterwards , like a queue of people wanting to ask questions , which most other comedians don't get , and I think it's because I'm making myself quite approachable compared to most other academics or most other people that communicate on climate change who maybe seem like they're , you know , more intellectual or more like a scientist or like , can not talking down as such , but you know that's sort of like I'm the one with the knowledge and I'm imparting this on you , but I spend a lot of time on stage talking about how I'm just like everyone else and you know , give examples of my life being like and so , and because you're being funny and kind of self-deprecating and warm , people want to then come and speak to you afterwards and feel like there's more of a connection there than they would with other kind of climate communication . As much , you know and I mean mean more the general public you still get the same .

Matt Winning 36:13

There's always some people in the crowd that will come up and talk to the speaker regardless , because they're just , you know , have their own opinions or whatever . You know . There's just always people like that in every event that you ever go to , whether it's comedy or just , you know , like a climate conference or whatever but you do get here , you know I get family members coming up . You know people with bringing their kids up to talk to me and asking questions and like younger people coming up and asking , you know , questions about their career and what can they do with climate change , or people just kind of coming up and telling you their worries about it , and that's really nice and I think it's a really important thing and it shows you that it can be such a sort of positive tool to kind of start conversations about it , to get people feeling comfortable to talk about it .

Ryan Grant Little 36:58

There's something very powerful in that about communication about climate change as well . Right that , if you can kind of bring yourself into the look . I'm not perfect . I know these things and I want to share it . Rather than you know , I'm the guy with all the answers .

Matt Winning 37:12

Yeah , and people want to talk . I think they want to talk to scientists or they want to talk to , you know , who understands this a bit more , and they want to ask questions . But people need to feel comfortable enough to be able to ask questions without feeling stupid or whatever . So it's such a positive thing . I wish I had more time to do it . I wish I had like another hour afterwards where I could just be like okay , there's going to be an hour of comedy and then there's going to be an hour of a Q&A in another room and we can all have a big conversation about this , because it does feel like there's always that sort of demand for that sort of thing .

Ryan Grant Little 37:44

You've also got a book that you published two years ago called Hot Mess what on earth can we do about climate change ? And one of its blurbs says that the book explains why we're playing the world's worst choose-your-own-adventure , and that really caught my eye . I mean , I kind of have a sense that I agree with it , but why are we ? In what way are we playing the world's worst choose-your-own-adventure ?

Matt Winning 38:08

Well , I guess it was a way of trying to get people to understand that we are in control of this . I think there's a lot of you know , there's a kind of view out there that climate change is happening and it's just going to happen regardless of what we do . But actually we constantly have active decisions to make , whether that's as a global society or whether that's at a country level or , you know , a town level or a individual level . There's always we are all part of this much wider choose your own adventure , essentially like and it is we can view it in a more positive way like that , like choose your own event , there are positive things to come . It can be an adventure . It can be something that we can feel like we're in control of and that we're invested in and that we're making active decisions , because the worst thing you can do is not make active decisions and just let stuff happen . And so I guess it was just trying to reframe climate change and at the moment , we've been making some bad decisions , but we've also been not making lots of decisions and just sort of letting stuff kind of happen . And so I guess , yeah , it's just that way of saying you know , we are in control of this . It is humans that are causing it and therefore , it is humans that can fix it .

Matt Winning 39:20

And also , we have to actively participate in it and make decisions . And it's not about it's constant decisions , you know . It's not just one decision and then you're done , and it's not oh , we need to wait until 2050 to make a decision . It's constantly there are . Every time we turn the page , there's another step that needs to be made and we're navigating it and we might not be perfect and we might make mistakes along the way , like these books , we might end up in a direction that we didn't expect or didn't want to go , but you still have to constantly actively make choices and , yeah , I hope that people . There's a large part of climate change that I feel people don't feel actively involved in it or they don't realize how much agency they or we as a kind of you know nation or a species have , and we need to re-inject some of that agency .

Ryan Grant Little 40:12

We used to say in my MBA not making a decision is also a decision . Yes , exactly .

Matt Winning 40:17

Exactly yeah , and it's not a particularly ever going to be a particularly good decision , maybe if you're lucky .

Ryan Grant Little 40:24

Like the Homer Simpson , hide under a bunch of coats and hope everything works out . Yeah , exactly , exactly .

Matt Winning 40:28

That's out . Yeah , yeah , exactly , exactly that's what we've done .

Matt Winning 40:31

That's what we've done for the last 20 years hide under some coats I wanted to ask what you're working on next , but I've got a feeling it's probably a curriculum for this , uh for for the lecturing you're doing at ucl yeah , next , specifically , I've got a lecture , a module to write in the next few weeks , so that's going to take up the next kind of month or two , but beyond that we're starting to write a new show that is going to be out probably next summer , so sort of starting to work towards a new show . I've got a couple of ideas for what that show might be , which has been fun because I've not kind of written a full new show for a couple of years . So , yeah , I'm trying out lots of stuff . I think it's going to be fun . Do come back in a year's time and see what I'm up to .

Matt Winning 41:14

There's some more kind of working on pitches for a radio series , a kid's book about climate change as well , something that I've been working on for the last kind of half a year . Not sure when that's going to happen , but hopefully soon . My book actually just came out in China . I don't know if we ever get any chinese listeners , but it came out in china a couple of weeks ago . I believe it was at the shanghai book fair . So if you're chinese and you want to read my book , hot mess , um , I can't pronounce the title of it , but I think it is translated directly .

Matt Winning 41:45

But yeah , that's out in china now and then , yeah , kind of lots of kind of small bits of ideas for things , but I guess I'm trying to talk about climate using comedy , but across lots of different mediums . That's the idea . So you know , and most of that comes down to time , some more online videos and content , because the comedy world has drastically changed since covid , and so you kind of need to be , you need to have an online presence now , which I didn't have the time for slash , I'm a bit useless at , so that's the other thing that I'm going to put a bit of effort into over the next year or so well , I'm going to put some links in the show notes to some of your stand up and particularly to the tedxx that you gave , because I was literally , when I was researching this episode , I was sitting at a cafe in Prague with my headphones on and just laughing like a crazy person .

Matt Winning 42:39

Yeah oh , thank you . And yeah , the context . If you do go and watch the TEDx talk , I gave you the context before we started chatting . But basically it was a long day of talks and so the first five minutes or so the audience aren't really laughing , and mostly that's because the talk before me , directly before me , was about sexual assault at music festivals , which was not the funniest topic , and then people were like , are we allowed to laugh ? And so it takes a few minutes to get into it . So if you see people kind of laughing and going , maybe that joke isn't funny because these people aren't laughing . No , those people were just . I love kind of how people were taking their time .

Ryan Grant Little 43:30

You know , I mean , maybe TEDx's are generally not funny or something like that , but but just taking their time to dip their toes into like , are we allowed to laugh at this ? Is this like ? Is this okay ? Cause , you know , if someone was , it was pretty good like decent humor , not just kind of the canned humor that you know that you see more on these TED talks , but anyway . So I encourage people to listen to it . I'll put that and a link to your website , which is very colorful I really liked it as well and has a bunch of your everything from journals through to stand up stuff there . Matt , thanks so much for being on the podcast . Absolute pleasure , absolute pleasure . Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast . It would mean a lot if you would subscribe , rate and share this podcast . Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom . Find me , ryan Grant Little , on LinkedIn . I'll be back with another episode next week . Bye for now .