Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
If you don’t laugh, you’ll probably cry, with comedian and climate researcher Matt Winning
"I was sitting at a cafe in Prague with my headphones on and just laughing like a crazy person." -Ryan, watching Matt’s TEDx talk.
Matt Winning is an environmental researcher and stand-up comedian who combines his expertise in climate change with humor to engage audiences.
In this episode we talked about:
🌍 How climate change became Matt's focus due to its urgency and lack of widespread attention
🎭 Using comedy as a tool to start conversations about climate change and make people comfortable discussing the topic
📚 Matt's book "Hot Mess" and its portrayal of climate action as a choose-your-own-adventure
🔬 The importance of active decision-making in addressing climate change at all levels
🎤 Matt's upcoming projects, including a new comedy show and a children's book about climate change
#Standup #Comedy #Climate #ClimateTech
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: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:Hi Ryan, how are you doing?
Ryan Grant Little: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: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: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:It would be a short thesis and easy to defend. Yeah, exactly that was.
Matt Winning: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: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: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:I feel like when you give a date for the end of the world, then averages probably is not the right measure.
Matt Winning: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: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:So.
Matt Winning: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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:Nice.
Matt Winning:Well, I'm sure, after being on this, podcast.
Ryan Grant Little: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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:I think a lot of comedians cannot wait to be able to give up their day job like.
Matt Winning: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: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: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:it's like this venn diagram, right?
Matt Winning: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: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: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: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: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: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: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:I went, actually.
Matt Winning: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: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: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: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: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:Yeah absolutely.
Matt Winning: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: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: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: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: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: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: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: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:We used to say in my MBA not making a decision is also a decision. Yes, exactly.
Matt Winning:Exactly yeah, and it's not a particularly ever going to be a particularly good decision, maybe if you're lucky.
Ryan Grant Little:Like the Homer Simpson, hide under a bunch of coats and hope everything works out. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Matt Winning:That's out. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly that's what we've done.
Matt Winning: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: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: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: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: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.
